


Before I Sleep

by HeatedHeadwear (SplickedyHat)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Bullying, Depression, F/M, Family Feels, Fluff, Gen, Humanstuck, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of miscarriage, Petstuck, Sadstuck, Slurs, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-02-07
Packaged: 2018-01-10 10:45:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 36,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SplickedyHat/pseuds/HeatedHeadwear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Rosa Maryam and you grew up dreaming of a perfect family, being the perfect wife, the perfect mother.  After the miscarriage at eighteen, you were lost.  After the divorce a year later, you were broken.  When hope arrives in the strangest possible form, a well-intended but tasteless gift, you don't recognize it.  Not at first.<br/>You did not give birth to your son but he is yours, and he saved your life, and you will never let anyone hurt him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In the Chillest Land

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coldhope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/gifts), [saccharineSylph](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saccharineSylph/gifts).



> Special thanks to: coldhope and saccharineSylph, on whose ficmarried universe (UFUT/Loophole) this fic is based, and who answered all my questions kindly and patiently. Also, paperseverywhere, sylphee, and several others for the preemptive slew of fanart, my parents for answering questions about the Sixties, and finally my fabulous beta SplickedyLit, who writes for this account's other pseud SpoonerizedSwiftness. Her feedback has been invaluable and encouraging.  
> Credit must also go to tumblr user onewayworld for requesting the original picture: http://toastyhat.tumblr.com/post/61789901090/oh-my-gosh-sorry-more-proof-that-i-really-should-be  
> I can't believe how much has come from it.  
> Chapter One owes its title to "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" by Emily Dickinson.  
> EDIT: Made a mix for this story on 8tracks: http://8tracks.com/toastyhat/before-i-sleep

This is how it begins.

You look around at the drab décor and all you can do is bite your lip and blink hard and try to keep your composure.  What could Mama possibly be thinking?

“We thought you might like to commemorate the day somehow,” she says—quiet, sweet, understanding, and you just keep staring in gentle horror, wondering how you could possibly respond to that. 

You want to say, _Yes, it’s been a year, but the baby is dead.  Let her stay dead._

_Let me forget._

But you know how dismayed she would be, how her injured response would have everything to do with the boxes of little clothes and books and toys in your basement, the ones you don’t care enough about to move…and nothing to do with the fact that she’s actively reminding you of what they represent.

You try to smile, something you’ve barely done at all in the past year and a half, but you feel your face might crack if you push it too far.  You let it fall back into a neutral expression.

“It’s a…a nice thought, Mama.”

She clucks and hugs you.  “I love you, _Cara_!  We’re all here for you, you know.”

How long it will take for you to be overwhelmed and find an excuse to be alone so you can cry?  Maybe an hour or so, since any more talk about Lu…about the ba…any more talk about last year might drive you to distraction.

You kiss the cheeks of what seems like an endless parade of relatives, greeting some of them in rusty Italian.  In school you were always told that you should be “speaking English at home”, and your parents’ language still embarrasses you somehow.

An aunt says that Great-grandmother sends her regards and still thinks you should join her in the convent because “now that the marriage has been annulled there’s nothing stopping you”. 

Maybe you should take old Mother Maryam’s offer this time.

Dinner starts late because relatives on Mama’s side refuse to eat any earlier than 8:00.  The broad family table is covered in dark linen, and around the candles Mama—or a daughter-in-law working under her instruction—has arranged fresh fruit and vegetables, most of which will no doubt be gone before dessert. 

The atmosphere is incongruously cheerful for the “occasion”.  You feel distant and blank until conversation turns in your direction, at which point your stomach twists a little and you hastily drop a comment about Kennedy’s foreign policy.  After that, the clamor of debate downs out all other topics and you draw back with a sigh.

Soon everyone seems to have forgotten the black tablecloth and little cards with condolences written on them sitting around the house, and you’re praying it stays that way.  But after dinner, when the men are sipping wine and the women are taking care of the dishes that won’t fit in Mama’s new dishwasher, the other shoe drops.

There is a late guest, heralded by an influx of chilled autumn air as the door opens and a gratingly familiar voice-- “Rosa, we bought a present for you!”

Oh…it’s your sister-in-law. You set down the cup you were drying, press a towel to either hand, and go to greet your brother and his wife.  Patricia hugs you and kisses your cheeks.  

You smell perfume and remember, in an absent way, that you haven’t showered recently.  Against your cheek, Patricia’s hair is glossy with hairspray.  Her clothes are always the newest off the line and a part of you hates her dully for being so energetic and cheerful.  Tancredo, dark-eyed and bearded, stands to one side, holding an old gray pet carrier and giving you an apologetic stare—dear lord, what’s in it…

You don’t have to ask.  Patricia ushers Tancredo forward, saying, “He got a raise this year and we decided to buy you something special!  I thought this would be perfect because—well, you’ll see.  We’d almost given up but this one was on sale because it’s an unlisted kind of troll.”

“Unlisted?” you say, then, “ _Troll_?”

Tancredo hands you the carrier, grimacing briefly at you before stepping back to make a beeline for the wine.

“It’s the wrong color or something,” says Patricia.  “Anyway, it was still quite expensive but I thought of how much you used to love those little…caterpillars…”  She grimaces, and then brightens.  “Well, have a look!”

You have a look.

You had heard that trolls hatched from eggs as larvae, but you’ve never actually seen one before.  The grub is curled up near the back of the gray box.  It’s a little over a foot long, with dark, soft fur growing in close, scale-like tufts from its head. Its segmented body is a shiny scarlet.  You count six short legs, each with small, hooked claws curled under its belly.

“Well,” you say, “I’m not sure…” 

You trail off at the husky noise coming from the little red shape—a sort of chirruping hum.  It rolls over with groggy slowness and then crawls a bit closer to the wire door of the carrier, almost tripping over its own legs.  A round, gray, snub-nosed face peers out at you with sleepy red eyes.  It sniffs once and then yawns hugely, and you catch a glimpse of a black tongue and small, perfect white teeth.

And then it chirrups again and keels straight over onto its side to sleep and you feel a surge of fondness in your chest, faint but so unexpected that you almost gasp. 

“Oh, it’s awake.”  She tries to sound pleased and fails.  You are too preoccupied with the sudden flare of emotion to care.

“Does it have a name?” you ask, setting the carrier down on the table.

Patricia smiles brightly, seeming genuinely proud of herself now.  “No, but it’s a boy, so I thought you might call _him_ Luciano.”

_Oh._

Nearby, Tancredo chokes on his wine.  Your face is hot; your lungs are suddenly void of air; you have to force your hands not to clench into fists.  But even this hot, awful feeling can’t completely become anger.  Soon, you know, it’s going to fall back into the void inside you and you’ll be left with nothing but the tears.

You’ve already spent a year like this.  You can’t take another.

“Patty, we should go,” says Tancredo, hastily putting an arm around his wife’s shoulder.

“But we just got here, can’t we—“

“I’d just like to go home,” he says, not looking at you.  “Please, darling?  It’s been a long day.”

She considers, and then kisses him once and says, “…Alright.  See you at Easter, Rosa, enjoy your present!”

She hugs you and you can’t hug her back.

You realize, picking up the carrier with one trembling hand, that you’ve reached the point where you need time alone.

You go to the bathroom first, running the tap water ice cold and bending down to splash it on your face over and over.  When you look up at the mirror, water trickling down your numb skin, the face you see is the same as ever; a young woman with short, dark hair, olive skin, and an arched nose that makes her more handsome than beautiful. 

You stare in a kind of stupor into your own dull, dark jade eyes until someone knocks on the door.  Time to find somewhere else.

Your old bedroom upstairs is illuminated only by dusk light from the window.  The carpet has been vacuumed, your bed stripped of covers.  You’re surrounded by dusty childhood memories and they seem almost to belong to a stranger.  You drop the carrier on the bed next to you without much concern for its occupant.

The house is small and despite the volume of the company downstairs, there’s still a chance someone will hear you.  You squeeze your eyes shut, mouth frozen in an open, soundless grimace.  You shake all over with the effort of containing spasmodic sobs.

You cry for a timeless interval, in a daze of misery and words repeated over and over again in your mind.  You dimly count the four tears that actually fall, dropping onto your knees, leaving spots on the green of your skirt.

And then you’re spent.  You relax muscle by muscle, taking slow, trembling breaths.  You can hear the sound of the television downstairs, and that at least gives you a leaden kind of relief.  They’ll be less likely to notice your absence with _I Love Lucy_ to distract them.

You don’t register the noises coming from the carrier at first.  It’s only when the chirruping escalates into a high, complaining cry that you turn abruptly to look at the grub.

He’s awake now, bumping up against the carrier door, squeaking insistently.  You realize distantly that it seemed wrong to keep him in there from the instant you saw his face, and you open the door.

You think for a moment he’ll recoil, but instead he nuzzles against you and crawls clumsily onto your bedspread. Glancing into the dark recesses of the carrier, you see red, waxy fragments of what might be an egg shell.  Just how recently did he hatch?

The grub doesn’t move like the caterpillars you raised to maturity when you were young; rather he seems just now to be learning how.  His legs are clumsy; he meanders, not unlike a human child.

 _Luciano_ , you think abruptly, and cover your face.  The hot anguish that’s been fading for the past half-hour resurfaces painfully. 

 _Like a baby learning how to crawl_ —

Something bumps against your leg and you look down through a gap in your fingers to meet wide, curious eyes.  You let your hands fall away from your face and the grub curls backward, ungainly with surprise, chirruping loudly. 

Then his eyes crinkle shut and it’s such an bright, unmistakably _smiling_ expression that you can’t help returning it in surprised delight—a genuine smile, not the tight imitation you gave Mama earlier.  You feel like a miniature sun just rose inside you, and again the unexpected happiness leaves you oddly breathless.

He whines again and something occurs to you. 

“Patricia didn’t feed you, did she?” you ask.  Another plaintive noise.  You take that as confirmation and tentatively scoop him up.

The grub is warm, his red body oddly smooth in comparison to the velvety skin of his face.  In your arms, he squirms for a moment before nestling in the crook of one arm and rolling up like a pillbug, a little hot bundle of chirruping and quiet breathing.

You almost start crying again and you don’t understand why—it’s that sharp, bright feeling, and it’s been too long, your body doesn’t know how to respond except with tears.  But you can’t sit down and cry now. 

You have a responsibility.

You feed the grub leftover salad from dinner, as you might any of your childhood caterpillar charges, but he squirms in your arms to sniff at the casserole and Uncle Eugene’s sandwich and you’re starting to think maybe he’ll just eat anything.  Come to think of it, you don’t know much about trolls at all.

You’ll have to visit the library later, you think, and then wonder how long it’s been since you visited a library.

On the way home, your hands are cold on the wheel, dinner churning in your stomach.  But with the pet carrier on the passenger seat, you feel a little less lonely.  There’s still a part of you, bitter and sad and disinterested, that says _No, this is exactly what Patricia wanted, how dare she try to replace my child, how dare she, I should just give the thing up, I can’t afford this--_

But something’s starting to stir, some part of you that’s been sleeping for a year.  You’re making lists, planning budgets, wondering whether you can take boarders in the empty bedrooms of the lonely little house _he_ left you.  Can you take sewing work?  How long can you leave a grub on its own so that you can work?

Something’s filling up that void inside you, the one you thought couldn’t be filled.  It’s like grains of sand falling into a canyon, but something is changing.

\--

The grub really does eat anything.  You try the blandest of foods—applesauce, oatmeal, more salad—and then move on to larger pieces of fruit and bread.  The bread is homemade with a tough, chewy crust, but if anything he seems to enjoy the chewing.

You don’t want to leave him in the box overnight, but you certainly can’t let him loose in the house.  If only you had a pen…  But it’s late, and you’re not sure you could even make some kind of impromptu fort.  Unless…

The crib is cherry wood, an antique, light enough to carry up from the basement without winding yourself.  You replace the perfectly folded wool blankets with newspaper, trying not to think about how wrong this feels, and set the carrier gently down in the crib.

Even when you open the door he doesn’t emerge, and you don’t want to wake him.  Instead, you add a makeshift nest of towels in one corner to compensate for the unfriendly, flat expanse of newsprint.  And after a little work, you secure another one over the top of the crib.  You don’t know how good troll grubs are at climbing, but you don’t want to risk it.

You fall into bed planning an agenda for the week, your heart beating faster than it has in months.  There’s so much to do…

When you wake up, the sky outside is a clear periwinkle blue, an encouraging sight after weeks of steel gray clouds.  You think idly that you should do housework some time. You were always faithful about it early in the marriage, but after that day at the doctor’s office it became an obsession, compulsive rituals completed in an attempt to make yourself more useful. 

When it was all over you didn’t want to do anything anymore, and the house…the house is a mess.  There are unwashed clothes piled in one corner of your room and you feel a sudden flash of annoyance that makes your eyes well up again.

You shake your head sharply and turn to get out of bed.  It’s nine in the morning, early for you.  Even your sleeping habits have fallen lax without your noticing—when did you start sleeping in until noon every day?  You stagger towards the kitchen, ignoring the state of the bathroom as you pass it.  Cleaning can wait.  Before that, it’s breakfast and then—

You see the crib in the living room and remember.  If he left the box over night, he must have crawled back in.  You move the towel aside and gently lift the carrier to look.

It’s empty.

Panic sets in immediately.  How did he get out?  The bars can only be two or three inches apart, surely he couldn’t have squeezed between them?  Where can he have gone?  Is there any way he could have gotten out of the house?

Visions of yourself searching the house for hours on end flash through your mind as you rush through the kitchen, and are abruptly curtailed when you see that one of the lower cabinets is wide open.  You drop to your knees and peer into the darkness, heart pounding.

Your eyes adjust with painful slowness.  You see first a pile of oats, spilling from a brown paper bag that you don’t remember ever opening.  And then, as you lean further forward, the bright red of the grub’s body comes into view.  He’s curled up, sleeping, looking very full and round. 

You reach hurriedly forward to pull him into your arms, both relieved and worried.  Did he overeat?  Is that even possible for a growing grub?  You remember how much your adopted caterpillars would eat before shedding and pupating, but trolls obviously have a very different diet.  You really need a book.

The local library is only a few blocks away, and although you don’t want to leave the grub alone in the box he came in, it seems to be the best way to keep him out of trouble.  You resolve to come home as soon as possible.

The library only has one book on grubs.  It’s a small red paperback, practically a pamphlet, with the Betty Crocker logo of all things stamped on the corner.  The more of it you read, the further your heart sinks because it’s not so much a how-to guide as a collection of advertisements.  It was published nearly a decade ago.

 _Trollchow!_ one page announces, the exclamation accompanied by a rosy-cheeked housewife pouring kibble into a bowl.  At her feet sits what looks like nothing so much as a small, gray child.  Its cheeks are also round and blushing, but the artist has colored them blue instead.  You had forgotten about trolls and their strange blood colors.

Turning the page makes you forget all over again.  The prices are ghastly, utterly impossible for a woman living alone, relying on her parents for money.  How on earth are you going to afford owning a troll when the only company selling troll products makes everything so expensive?

How are you going to do this?

…Do you _have_ to do this?

You look down at the kibble in the advertisement.  The artist has done his level best to make it look appetizing, but there’s only so much to be done with pet food.  You compare it mentally to your grub’s interest in lettuce, applesauce, casserole, and oats.

Suddenly, you have a lot more trouble believing the little troll’s beatific smile.  You glance at the illustration again and see for the first time the collar around its neck.  The artist included a name on the tags.

“Cobalt”.  You grimace.  It’s somehow hard to imagine giving your grub a pet name, whatever conventional pet troll names are supposed to sound like.  You’ll have to put real thought into it.

And you do.  Naming takes even longer than expected and you end up making a list—Biblical names, classical poets, favorite relatives—and cross them out one by one.  The grub sits comfortably on one of your shoulders, tiny orange horns bumping your chin.  You squint at him, imagining calling him _Nathaniel, Bartolomeo, Armando, Francis,_ and none of those fit.  You keep crossing out.

Eventually you’re left with Silas, the name of your favorite uncle on your father’s side, and Canaan, one of Noah’s grandsons.  But you’ve never met anyone named Canaan, and it seems just exotic enough to be a pretentious pet name.

You pick Silas.

\--

A month passes.  You clean the house.  Silas keeps you so busy that sometimes you even go a whole day without thinking about _him_ or the baby or the divorce. 

New knowledge about troll grubs blindsides you on a daily basis—you realize early on that Silas can, in fact, squeeze through the bars of his crib, and does so with distressing frequency before you line the crib with new blankets. 

When he does move around the house on his own, he ends up behind couches, in air vents and once, memorably, stuck in a hole in the drywall that even he couldn’t fit through.  His plaintive whining brings you running into the spare bedroom, where you spend a good half hour extracting him from the hole. 

It’s just as well he’s learning to come to you when you say his name.

The first time he starts crying, you almost run him to the nearest vet for fear his eyes are bleeding—trolls cry in the color of their blood, and it’s terrifying, you have no idea why they would do that, but after his cries subside, so do the translucent scarlet tears. 

In addition to eating anything (you try to keep his diet balanced), he chews on anything.  His teeth are only little blunted points, but they do remarkable damage to the legs of furniture, books and magazines, and, eventually, the straps of the wristwatch you keep on the end table in the living room. 

The watch was a gift from your husband.  You let Silas keep it.  When the leather finally comes to pieces, though, you find yourself in the local pet store looking for a replacement.  You have the oddest feeling the whole time that you ought to be buying baby chew toys instead, but you brush it off.

He sheds twice, eating voraciously and growing so fast—he’s almost as long as your forearm by the time he breaks through his old skin for the second time.  You’re familiar with shedding, but your caterpillars were never so vocal about it. 

You look after him.  You keep a spray bottle on hand for his dry skin.  You comb pieces of cracked exoskeleton out of his soft hair and run a thumb over his tiny orange horns when he starts whining.  He seems to like horn-rubs a lot, so you end up giving them a lot to keep him calm.

He purrs, you’ve discovered, like a cross between a cat and a cricket.  And there are other, more human noises in his repertoire, soft babbles and even squeaking laughter.  You play peek-a-boo with him almost every day, carrying him on your shoulders when he gets tired of playing.

And then, just as you’re starting to get used to your new housemate, you wake up one day to find a chrysalis lying in his crib, still partially wrapped in old exoskeleton.

You should have expected it.  You never knew exactly how old Silas was, but you knew he’d been getting bigger and he’d become more sluggish recently and you should have recognized the signs. Now, looking down at the dull grey sheath lying on the blankets, you wish you’d tried to do more research.  You should have known.

You wish you’d been here to make sure he was all right shedding that last layer of skin.  At least he doesn’t seem to have made an effort to hang himself from the edge of the crib.  You hope that means trolls are meant to pupate on the ground, and not that you failed to give him the right environment.

There was nothing in the Betty Crocker booklet about this.  You don’t know what temperature the chrysalis should be, how long the process will take, what signs might indicate that it’s drying out.  You don’t know anything.

You don’t know how you’ll stand waiting.

\--

After the first week, life starts to lose the energy it had with your new pet around the house.  You consider moving the chrysalis…but in the end the crib seems like the best place for it.  Still, it’s unnerving…the sight of that oddly lifeless dark shape where Silas used to be.

After the second week, you stop cleaning.

After the third week, you find yourself crying on the living room floor thinking about the caterpillars who never became butterflies.  Mama calls once and you barely have the strength to answer the phone, let alone make conversation about plans for Easter—it’s another month away, for God’s sake, and why is she asking you?

You start forgetting to eat.  Sometimes you remember the cold drop in your stomach after the doctors told you the baby wouldn’t make it.  The abrupt emptiness inside you as though someone flicked a lightswitch.

This is the same and it’s the second time and now it’s ten times worse.  Some nights you’re convinced that Silas won’t survive pupation.  Some nights you vomit from worry and stress.  Some nights you would rather lie down on the floor than stagger to bed.

The worst part is that you’re aware on a separate, distant level that your fears are irrational.  You have no idea how long pupation is supposed to take for trolls—it has to be longer than just ten days, they’re so much bigger.  So it makes sense for Silas to spend weeks pupating, and it doesn’t make sense for you to worry yourself to the point of despair.  But you do. 

Taking care of him was what kept you active and now it’s the only thing you’re motivated to do.  You keep the chrysalis warm and your spray bottle on hand.  You don’t even think about the heating bill.

As the fifth week starts, you begin to wonder whether you should just give up.  It’s been over a month.  You spend the next couple of days curled up on the floor next to the crib, unaware of date or time, only occasionally making your way to the kitchen.  Nothing seems particularly appetizing.

You’re on your way back from one such trip when you glance into the crib and something is…different.  The gray of the chrysalis is lighter, its surface shinier.  Peering closer, you think you can see faint shapes through it.

You come alive.  Your brain is on fire, your heart beating so hard and fast that you can feel it in your whole body.  _It’s starting._

Your hands are shaking as you spread out blankets on the floor and gently move the chrysalis down.  You’re happy, you’re unbelievably, ludicrously happy, so of course you start crying again.  You’re starting to think you won’t be able to have any emotion without crying ever again, but after a while the tears stop and you’re left to watch and wait.

It takes longer than expected.  Every couple of hours you blink yourself from a doze and the chrysalis is a little bit clearer.  By the time it starts, you’re barely awake. 

It’s just a little tremble but for some reason it rouses you and you immediately pitch forward, eyes fixed on the tightly-curled gray shape inside the almost-translucent exoskeleton.  It shakes again, rolls a little to one side, and you see air bubbles appearing between the chrysalis and its occupant. 

A moment later, there’s a little _pop_ and a damp, dark-haired head appears.  More splits appear and you hover in anxious wonder as small, chubby gray arms unfold slowly into fresh air.

You’re almost afraid to touch him, but you’re too relieved to refrain entirely.  You stroke his head gently as the rest of him comes free and slowly uncurls.  You’re taken aback for a moment by how… _human_ he looks. 

There are subtle differences, of course—the gray skin (there’s no sign of red now), and his horns are more noticeable than before, but as he slowly stretches out his limbs, you think he looks just like one of your nephews waking up in the morning.

Tentatively, you slide both hands under him and lift him onto your lap.  His skin is damp too, and oddly velvety.  He squirms and stretches in your grasp, little fingers flexing, and you feel the tears starting again.

It’s almost a quarter past four on Friday.  You have Silas back.

He sleeps in your bed, a small, warm presence next to you.  When you wake up around noon he’s still there, breathing deeply.  You realize you can see his ribs and are immediately concerned; he’s been using up his stored nutrients for a month, after all.  He needs food.  And when you set him cautiously down on the floor, the first hesitant, wobbling steps he takes are in the direction of the kitchen.

He falls more times than you can count getting there, but he never cries, just gets to his ungainly gray feet and keeps toddling, determined.  Following him, you realize abruptly that after food, he’s going to need _clothes._  

You try wrapping him in a towel but he just shakes it off and you haven’t the heart to pin it on him, so you hoist the nude baby troll onto a kitchen chair, which he stares at with sheer wonderment, as though the chair is some magical levitation device. 

You watch him anxiously for a moment in case he shows any signs of falling off, but he just babbles loudly and bounces where he sits, smacking both hands down on the table.  And then on the chair.  Apparently enamored by the ability to make noise with his newly-developed limbs, he pats his own stomach repeatedly.

You make scrambled eggs to the sound of homemade percussion and delighted squeaks.  Outside, a vividly blue sky peeks through the cloud cover.  You are full of light and expanding, buoyant joy.

Silas has trouble holding forks with his new hands, so you patiently spoon scrambled eggs into his mouth.  By the time you’re done, there are little yellow crumbles all over the table but at least he seems to be full for the moment, hands patting contently at the roundness of his belly.

This brings you, again, to the fact that he needs clothes.  You remember the Crocker pamphlet’s page about clothes, and how much money they were asking for troll-tailored outfits.

Let them ask.  You have a sewing machine.

“Silas,” you say, clearing the table, “I think we should go shopping today.”

You swaddle him in a blanket and he hardly complains, seeming tired again now.  You don’t blame him.  It was a long night for both of you.

He sleeps with his head against your shoulder as you shop.  You only get a few second glances in the second-hand store, but you’re still self-conscious browsing the children’s clothing corner. 

You buy him white button-up shirts and a couple pairs of trousers, and then, as an afterthought, a little coat.  It’s almost more than your wallet can take, but in the end you squeak by with fifty cents to spare.

It’s worth it.

But before you try to get the clothes on him, it’s bath time.  He’s still sticky from pupation, and there’s even a little bit of chrysalis still clinging to his hair.  When you call him, he toddles eagerly over to the tub, bangs his hands on the side, and reaches out to feel the tap water. 

He giggles and you laugh too, but when you move to lift him into the tub he squirms and cries out.  You think at first that he’s just scared of the water, but when you deposit him in the tub he stops squeaking.  Upon closer examination, you find that there are patches of thin, reddened skin on either side of his torso.  Is he sick? Are they injuries?

But no, he seems well—he’s even purring as he settles into the water.  You resolve not to worry about it, or try not to, anyway—it’s probably just a troll thing, that’s what you’re going to think for now. 

You start scrubbing him down and get some shampoo in his hair, which is very thick and extremely soft, and you even manage not to get any in his eyes.  The bath goes without incident until you’re done rinsing him, at which point he smacks his hands down on the surface of the water and babbles in wordless delight.

You realize, too late, that he’s discovered splashing.  He does it again and water sloshes over the side of the tub.  You hurry to pull the plug and say as firmly as you can, “Silas, _no_.  No.  Silas—”

He giggles and splashes again and you catch both his hands, moving them gently so that the waves are smaller—“ _Gentle_ , Silas.  Gentle.”

As luck would have it, he takes an interest in the ripples and swishes the water back and forth around him until it’s all gone.  He pats the bottom of the tub and looks up at you with a confused chirp, then stands up unsteadily, still chirping, and reaches for you. 

_…Oh._

There’s an odd lump in your throat as you reach down to pick him up, careful to touch his sides gently.  You hold him tight against you, a little bundle of heat and life, still soaking wet, and when he starts purring it’s the same husky sound you remember from when he was a grub.

It’s good to have someone who needs you again. 

It’s good to need someone again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A certain cluster of symptoms was only recognized as clinical depression in the 1980s, so neither Rosa nor her family really have a word for what she's going through. She does, however, understand that it's not a normal state to be in. And it's not over for her yet--having Silas gives her a purpose in life and someone to care for who doesn't make demands, but there are other issues left unresolved.  
> Chapter Two coming soon! Thank you for reading!


	2. Polite Meaningless Words

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rosa starts homeschooling her pet, who's starting to seem like something more, and takes him to her mother's house for Easter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Two owes its name to "Easter, 1916" by William Butler Yeats, who wrote the poem about Ireland's Easter Uprising in 1916. Without context, some lines fit well with the chapter but I thought it was important to acknowledge the real meaning behind it.  
> Hopefully I'll be able to find an appropriate title for Chapter Three that isn't so depressing.

There are so many boxes in the basement.  You haven’t come down here often in the past year, but recently you’ve been in and out of the storage room for all sorts of things you never thought you’d need for a pet. 

Today you’re looking for books, impatient and excited.  There’s a stack in one corner, the ones Mama used to read to you.  You take one-- _Goodnight Moon_ , it’ll do—and rush back upstairs.

He can talk.

It was after lunch and you were sitting, idle, with Silas on your lap.  He likes being read aloud to, you’ve noticed.  No matter what the content, he sits still to listen, so you’ve been taking every opportunity to read to him.

Today’s reading material was Papa’s old scrapbook of favorites, copied painstakingly out and compiled in a worn leather binder.  Papa’s favorites have long since become your favorites and you barely need to look at the words any more.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” you began, and Silas shifted and patted the paper with one languid hand.  He’s heard this one so many times by now. You smiled fondly down at him until he chirped and patted again and you started over hastily.

“ _I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a—“_

“Hossof kolendaffadulls.”

“ _—host of golden_ …Hm?”  You didn’t understand at first.  The words were slurred, the hard consonants sounding more like his usual chirping than anything else. 

Silas bounced impatiently in your lap, slapping the book officiously— _pap-pap-pap_.  “Awanna oandee azzacow,” he said, and again you were confused for a moment but then your eyes landed on the first line of the poem.

You repeated it one more time under your breath, then looked down at him, then at the book, then tucked your hands under his armpits and turned him around to face you.

“Silas,” you said, wondering, heart pounding, “good…good job!  Really good!”

He squirmed in your grasp, clearly torn between pride at your praise and indignation that you were no longer reading.  And you, elated, shifted him off your lap (“I’ll be back soon!”) and ran to find lighter reading material.

When you settle down again with the little cardboard book in hand, Silas is reluctant to sit in your lap again, but with a little coaxing he cooperates.  You open the book and he straightens, interested—thinking back, have you ever shown him a picture book?

No, you guess you haven’t.  You’ll have to remedy that. 

“Goodnight Moon,” you say, pointing to the words as you say them.  You only have vague memories of aunts reading to little cousins, but there are plenty of other books that will tell you how to teach…

…teach a child to read.

There’s a painful twisting sensation in your chest and your excitement dims a little.  Mama would think you were going mad if she could see you now.  _He won’t grow past this size,_ you remind yourself.  _He’s not human.  He probably doesn’t even understand the words you’re saying.  You’re spending too much time and effort on a new pet.  There must still something wrong with your head._

You keep reading.

“In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon.  And a picture of a cow...”

 _Goodnight Moon_ is a hit.  You thought at first maybe you should save it for bedtime, but if anything it just excites him so you read it together after lunch instead.  Within days, he knows to point along with you as you name the objects in sequence. 

After a couple of weeks you can stop mid-sentence—“ _…and a little old lady whispering_ —“—and he’ll finish, “ _Hssshhhhh_ ,” clumsily raising a finger to his lips.

You’re so proud it makes your heart flip over, and it makes you want to hold him tight and never let go… but you can’t help feeling foolish for giving him the building blocks of language when he won’t really know what to do with them.

The feeling persists for a while longer, until one Saturday night after baths when Silas surprises you again.  He’s mostly dry and dressed in his nightshirt, and you’ve already rumpled his hair vigorously with a towel (he barely complains these days). You’re opening the bathroom cupboard to find the brush when he hops up onto a stool next to you.

You look down, smiling and bemused, to see him pointing at something in the cupboard.

He says, “Bush.”

Again, it takes you a moment.  You don’t understand until you have the brush in your hand and he points at it, repeating the word.

You stare.  He stares back and says, again, “ _Bush_.”  And then he points at the basket it came from and says, “Cone.”

You stare some more, and then you slowly retrieve a comb and put it next to the brush on the counter.  You point at one and then the other, and then the first one again, and he names them with what seems like growing exasperation. 

You stroke his still-damp hair with a shaking hand—“Good job, Silas, you’re—you’re so smart!” _—_ and pull him up into your arms.  He seems heavier than before—how much is he going to grow? 

The night sky is a patchwork of clouds, but if you step out on the porch the moon is half visible.  You point to it, glancing to make sure he’s looking.

“Moon,” you say clearly.  “That’s the moon, Silas.  Like in the book!”

“Nigh’ moon,” he says, staring at the sky.  You wonder how many words you can start teaching him in one night, whether you should stop before you tire him out, but you’re too excited to put him to bed just yet.  You try another one he knows— _bowl_ —and then other objects around the house.  He picks up _blanket_ too, and _pillow_ , although the Ls are giving him trouble.

After about fifteen minutes of impromptu lessons, he starts getting testy and you remember yourself.  You carry him back to the room, brush his hair, and tuck him in next to you, your head spinning all the while.  And you think absently, _Just one more word, how could I have forgotten_.

You lean over him, put a hand over his chest, and say, “Your name is Silas.  _Si-las_.  That’s you!”

 _“Si’ess,”_ he mumbles, and as you move away he sits up a little and points at you instead.  _“Si’ess.”_

“No, Silas—“ you point to yourself “— _Mama_.  Ma…ma.”

 _“Mmmamama.”_   He lies back down, apparently satisfied, and you are left with your own words still echoing in your ears.

You pull the blanket over yourself, still shaken because you didn’t even _think_.  It didn’t feel unnatural even though you _know_ it should have, you know there’s a difference between treating a pet like a child and making a pet into your child. 

And yet even that thought is so discordant, the word “pet” is so _wrong_ , that you start looking for a way to rephrase it because he’s more than a pet, he can’t possibly be just an animal to you. 

What is he, then?  He’s not your pet and he can’t be your son, so what…?

You think of the way new things delight him and how smart he is and how he saved you, how you want to protect him, keep him safe…  And your husband divorced you, your own body betrayed your unborn daughter, your brothers and sisters and Mama are almost like strangers now.  Your dreams of a normal family were shattered a long time ago.

Maybe this is the best you can do.

\--

You struggle with it the next day, and the next, but it doesn’t keep you from reading to him.  Storybooks are all very well, but for some reason nothing seems to hold his attention so much as Frost or Browning, so you switch between master poets and the cardboard books from downstairs.

You keep teaching.  You thought the long words used in the poems might be a problem, but it seems that while abstract concepts are still beyond him, big words are certainly not. 

One day, you go to the park together, in the crisp early morning before the fog has burned away from the duck pond.  Together you walk down the green concrete path, stopping to look at early-blooming daffodils.  You teach him the word on its own and explain that a “host” means “a lot”.  A lot of daffodils. 

He picks five in a big handful before you can stop him and says, “Mama for _you_.”

You should scold him because the daffodils aren’t his to pick, but you’re so happy you could cry and you can’t help thanking him for the present.  Then you worry all the way home about whether you’re sending him mixed messages.

You’ve recently realized you’re a mother.  It took you too long, even after the night you told him to call you Mama.  You’ve had a child for months now and you didn’t even know it and now…you need help.

You can’t ask Mama or any of your other relatives so the next day you visit the library.  It’s already evening when you arrive there and the place is mostly empty.  You glance anxiously at the children’s section, wondering whether you should let Silas play there while you browse.

You decide against it, instead squeezing his hand once—“Stay with me, alright honey?”—and heading for the section where you know you’ve seen parenting books before.  You pull four likely-looking books off the shelf, brushing Silas’s hand aside as he attempts to do the same a couple of shelves down.

This of course makes him tearfully belligerent.  Desperate to avoid one of his rare but exceptionally loud tantrums, you drop to your knees and whisper, “Silas, _shoosh_ , sshhhh…  We’re quiet in the library, ssshhh.  Do you want to read these books?”

He nods fitfully, “’Es!”

Oh dear, it’s one of his moods.  He’ll stubbornly cling to the idea of getting _these books specifically_ , and you’re not sure you can both deny him that without causing a scene.

You swallow hard and look him straight in the eye.  “Silas, we’ll take these books home later, alright?  But first do you want to look at some other ones?  There are a _lot_ of books here.  Do you want to look at all of them?”

He sniffs, looking slightly disgruntled, and you can tell he still wants to protest, but you’re learning that whether he can read or not, Silas loves books.  No wonder he started trying to take some; he’s never seen so many books in one place and if he could he would probably sit for hours on end and flip through them.

Which is probably why he does eventually agree to explore.  And with one look at the children’s section, all thoughts of the self-help shelves’ contents are forgotten. 

He pulls out a picture book and opens it, running one soft hand over its pages almost wonderingly.  You haven’t started teaching him letters yet but when the moon is mentioned he points to the word and looks solemnly up at you to say, “ _Moon_.”

You stroke his hair and say, “Good job!” and he goes back to his serious business, apparently satisfied.

You decide you can probably leave him alone for a minute or two, but by the time you come back with your books he already has a stack of his own.  It’s about a foot high.

It takes some more explaining to make him understand that he can wait to read the books at home, but no amount of cajoling will convince him to let you carry them.  So you carry him instead, settling him into the backseat of the car with his pile.  You worry that he’ll stay up too late reading, but instead he falls asleep on his third book.

You remove it gently from under his head, putting it with the rest of his haul, and carry him to bed.

\--

You start teaching him the alphabet the next day, picking words he knows for each letter and circling them as you go—“S” is for Silas, of course.  He bounces and claps when you say it and you ruffle his hair.

“S” goes “sssss”, that’s the first lesson, and then you hastily go back to the beginning of the alphabet and sing the song for him.

There are colored ballpoint pens and pencils around the house but you wish you could buy him the box of crayons you’ve seen in commercials.   If anyone ever answers your advertisement for sewing work in the local paper, maybe you’ll be able to. 

For now, though, he seems completely content to write his name and the key words of Goodnight Moon on the sewing pattern paper you found in the old office.  His hands are still clumsy and weak, his letters shaky to the point of being unrecognizable, but he’s a fast learner. 

Everything is going so well that you almost forget how you felt before Silas entered your life.  And then, the Sunday before Easter, Mama calls.  You’ve been getting so much better at talking to people recently but your stomach still throbs with nerves when you pick up the telephone—it has to be her, who else would call you? 

_“Rosa?”_

You swallow and tighten your grip on the phone and answer.  It’s about Easter, of course—she wants to know when you’re coming, what you’ll bring, whether you think the lamb should be grilled or roasted.  You answer everything arbitrarily—you can be there by ten, you have enough allowance to buy a fruitcake, roasted sounds fine…

“…I’d like to bring Silas.”

 _“Who?”_ She sounds excited, hopeful.  You realize you never told her you’d named the troll, and immediately you know what she must be thinking.

“The troll,” you say hastily, “it’s what I named the troll Patricia gave me.  He’s in his second life stage now—I mean, he looks just like a little boy, but gray.  He’s…he’s very well-behaved!”

Your heart is in your throat; your hands sweat.  You wonder desperately why you didn’t just say you were sick.  You’re not up to the responsibilities you used to manage in the days before the divorce.

She hesitates, then says, _“…Well, alright, if he won’t bother any of your nephews and nieces.  Augusta’s newest isn’t very good with animals, did she tell you?”_

“He’s not--  I—I mean, no…she didn’t.”

_“Oh.  Well.  You’ll get the chance to talk to her next Sunday, anyway!  Ciao Rosalina, I love you!”_

“I love you too,” you mumble, and hang up.

You don’t know now whether you’re imagining her disappointment or whether you’ve just come to expect it, but recently it seems to pervade your every conversation with her.  

You are suddenly very hurt that she would expect you to find a new romantic prospect so soon.  Then you feel guilty for assuming that was her first thought on hearing you mention a man’s name.

A tug at your skirts draws your eyes downwards, to Silas.

“Mama.”

“Yes?”

“Mama.”

“What is it, Silas?”

“Mama, _mama_.”

You pick him up and bounce him in your arms, realizing only as you do so that he’s covered in dirt.

“Did Mama leave the back door open?” you murmur, opening one of his hands to look at his grimy palm.  “Here, let me see the other… _oh_.”

“Find frog,” he says, breathless and self-important. 

“No, Silas,” you manage, struggling to keep a straight face, “it’s a toad.  _Toad_.  See the bumps?”

“Bups,” he says, staring at his brown, amphibious charge.  “Toe has bups.”

“Good,” you say, glancing down at the muddy handprints on your skirt.  “Good job, Silas!  Let’s get cleaned up, alright?”

“Toe pee,” he tells you, and you have to choke back laughter again—his potty-training vocabulary is really coming along.  You remember a toad doing the same thing the last time you caught one. 

Of course, that was a long time ago and your mother immediately told you to wash your hands and stop holding dirty animals because you’d get warts.  It’s not something you’ll repeat to Silas, but in the end you decide his new friend can’t stay.  Eventually, a reluctant Silas seems to grasp that toads don’t belong in houses.

While washing his hair, you absentmindedly make plans for fruitcake and realize you feel a little bit better about Easter.

\--

You’re nervous again by the time you reach Mama’s house, holding the cake in one arm and holding Silas’s hand with your free one.  He’s dressed in the dress shirt and trousers you bought for him, looking for all the world like a Catholic choirboy after church.  Only his shoes seem out of place—he was uncomfortable in the little dress shoes you tried in the store, so he’s wearing tiny faux-leather moccasins.

You stand at the door for at least five minutes, one finger hovering indecisively over the doorbell.  In the end it’s Silas who saves you, padding forward to give three deliberate knocks.  He still hasn’t mastered the art of hitting with his knuckles, but the soft thumps of the heel of his hand against the door bring you back to reality.

Almost the instant you ring the bell, someone opens it and ushers you cheerfully in.  Silas gets some odd looks, but some of your younger cousins coo over him and his “precious little clothes”.  They ask you whether pet stores sell clothes to dress your trolls up in, how much you’re spending on food and toys, whether trolls are worth the money as a family pet.

You answer all the questions as best you can, though talking to so many people at once makes your voice unsteady.  You can’t remember the last time so many people _wanted_ to talk to you, not that you would have responded readily.  At least Silas makes a convenient conversation topic.

You keep him in your arms for as long as you can—it was an early morning for both of you and he’s still a little sick from the drive over.  But when he starts fidgeting you find a convenient corner where he can play with the building blocks Mama keeps around for visiting grandchildren.  Silas has never had building blocks before, and seems fascinated by the way they stack on top of each other.  You let him get on with it.

Eventually you’re drawn inexorably back into the dining room, where almost all your female relatives are gathered at one corner of the table, chattering animatedly.  They’re only a little awkward about welcoming you into the circle, and you realize why when the conversation restarts around you.

“…So I told her, you don’t _have_ to breast feed, but when you’re at home you might as well.”

“You don’t think that’s letting the infant get a bit too attached to you?”

“ _Uffa_ , I don’t see how that’s possible!  If the infant was attached to me for nine months, why should it be a problem once it’s left the womb?”

“Have you read that _Care and Discipline of Young Children_ book?  The one by the fellow with the funny name—Turnel?  Tunnel?”

“I’ve read that one,” you say before you can stop yourself, and then flush, your heart twisting as you wait for someone to ask why you’ve been reading childcare books when it’s been a year since your pregnancy.

But the women just exchange pointed, pitying looks and then turn back to you, indulgent and understanding.  Now your stomach roils instead as your mind fills with thoughts, speculations on what they must be thinking—

 _Poor Rosa, couldn’t keep her marriage, what a pity about the little baby, but I hear she went a bit funny after that, her poor husband, poor Rosa, poor Rosa, comforting herself with a pet, we won’t exclude you because you’re childless and all of us have happy families, don’t worry_ …

You swallow hard and try to banish the thoughts.  Desperately you think, _You’re making all of it up, you can’t read minds._

“Did you reach the chapter that mentioned the new studies they’re doing about affection in child rearing?” asks one of your cousins—Donna, maybe, you’ve always had trouble telling apart the triplets…

“No,” you manage, “I…never had time.”

More looks passed between everyone else.  You tell yourself you’re not going to cry this time, you’re going to be fine. 

“Well, apparently if you spend time coddling the child—you know, hugging, kissing, lavishing attention on it—you can really ruin it.”

“Really,” you say, unable to summon a more coherent response.  In the living room, a little boy starts shouting and you massage one temple absently, feeling the beginnings of a headache. 

Easter is not proceeding as planned.

The child-raising discussion ramps slowly up into a debate as one of your sisters mentions  “these studies a man named Harlow is doing with monkeys”.  The words wash over you while you wonder absently if Mama has anything in her medicine cabinet for you.

And you don’t realize the commotion in the living room has anything to do with Silas until you hear his voice raised in a husky, wordless yell.  You instantly excuse yourself from the kitchen and join a group of concerned adults in a press towards the area where the children are playing. 

As you approach, you can see that a skinny blonde child--one of your nephews--has a tight grip on one of Silas’s delicate ears and is pulling with merciless curiosity. Silas is struggling, obviously in pain, his repeated shouts of _"no!"_ interspersed with high-pitched chirrups.  But even as you move to intervene, Silas lashes out with one hand and clouts the other boy across the face. 

There’s an instant uproar and someone else gets to Silas before you can, holding him roughly by the arms and shaking him.

Your insides go white-hot. 

One of your first cousins is in your way but you push him bodily aside and stride forward to smack the offender across the face as hard as you possibly can.

 

You’re yelling something but you can’t hear yourself over the ringing in your ears; you could just be screaming wordlessly for all you care, you’re so _angry_.

It’s one of your sisters’ husbands, a crude-humored young man with sharp gray eyes.  He drops Silas and gestures violently, demanding in mixed languages what the hell you think you’re doing. 

Other relatives are asking similar questions but you ignore them and gather your son into your arms.  You are practically floating on your rage; your skin tingles, your breaths fill your lungs like expanding bellows.  You could breathe fire.

“It is not your job to discipline him!” you yell, holding your ground even as your furious brother-in-law advances. 

“ _Vaffanculo!_   Why shouldn't I?  You clearly haven’t been doing that job!” he retorts, and Silas trembles in your arms.  “You shouldn’t have let an untrained animal anywhere near—“

“He’s not an _animal_ , he’s my _son_ ,” you snap, and feel a hush begin to fall around you.  You swallow hard and suddenly you are a little more afraid than you are angry.

“Rosa,” Patricia begins, but you don’t want to hear what she has to day.  The way to the door is clear and you practically run out of the house with Silas in your arms, settling him into the passenger seat and starting the car with shaking hands.  It takes a couple tries, and beyond the still-open door a crowd of relatives stare out at you.

You don’t look back when you drive away, but in your rear-view mirror you see Mama walking down the drive, staring after you.  In the seat beside you, Silas starts to cry.

You’re never going back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The mother-child interactions in this story are often very personal for me because lot of the things Rosa says and does are based on my own mother, and the parts about homeschooling come from direct experience. At the same time, though, I'm around Rosa's age right now and her helplessness, inexperience, and anxiety are very much my own.  
> Inspiration for Silas comes mainly from my childhood of course, as well as my many young cousins and their weirdass shenanigans.


	3. Bed by Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Silas has some first experiences--good and bad--and Rosa tries to guide him through them as best she can. It's hard, being a mom and growing up, it's hard and her mother and sister-in-law don't understand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Three owes its title to "Bed in Summer" by Robert Louis-Stevenson, which makes an appearance in this chapter. "Eternal Lover" owes its title and blurb to the marvelous Splickedylit. The original concept of the moment with the oven mitts comes from Paperseverywhere on Tumblr, while the "No Pets Allowed" scene and the Mother's Day card scene were both originally fanart by Sylphee on Tumblr. Links are in the End Notes so as to avoid spoilers and the like.  
> I thought I would mention, since I already told someone in the comments about this, that in the 50s and 60s there actually were studies done that supposedly indicated that parents should avoid giving their children affection in order to raise them right. I made up the author of the book Rosa's relatives were quoting, but Harlow's studies with baby monkeys and fake mothers happened around the time this story takes place and were very important in disproving the whole "hugs will ruin your child" thing. Super interesting stuff.

As the sting of the disastrous Easter fades, the weather gets hotter.  Silas is remarkably resistant to sun—even when your olive face is reddened from a long day outside, his is still clean, velvety gray.  He’s terribly concerned by your peeling sunburn, patting your face all over and asking over and over again, “Mama okay?  Good?  Okay now?”

You almost forget about Mother’s Day.  You would have missed it completely if you hadn’t remembered to flip the page of a long-neglected calendar in the kitchen, but on the ninth of the month you turn it from January to May and see the eleventh staring you in the face, with the little holiday asterisk next to the number.

You mention the occasion to Silas, but before you can tell him more than the fact that it’s a day for telling Mamas how much you love them, you think of your own mother and falter.  He tries to ask more questions, but you distract him with the promise of a trip to the library, and you only feel a little bit bad about it.

You’re not expecting the card.

It’s drawn on one of the bright pink sheets of paper that the library leaves lying around for people to write down what Dewey Decimal number they need.  The red crayon was the last one left in his box of twelve and by the way the lines become smudged and faint you think he must have been running out of wax as he drew.  On the front in clumsy capital letters is written _HAPPY MOTHERS DAY_ —he ran out of room on “MOTHERS” and the last three letters march vertically down the side of the paper.

“Open,” he says, breathless, staring up at your face, obviously eager for your reaction. 

You open the card.  You look at it for a very long moment.  Then you close it again and drop to one knee to pull him into a long, tight hug, one of your hands pressing the card to his back.  He hugs you back, purring loudly, warm in your arms.  You stay there for a long time, slowly rocking him side to side and stroking his hair, squeezing your eyes shut.

“Mama?  Okay?”

“I’m fine, honey…”

“You crying.”

“I’m just very happy!”

He considers this for a moment, then hugs you tighter and says, “I love you, Mama.”

\--

It’s September and still hot on the day you try to take him into the grocery store.  If it weren’t still so hot you’d have left Silas in the car—your shopping trips are usually quite short but recently he’s started complaining when you come back out of the store, his face a blotchy red. 

This worried you because you hardly ever see his blood rise high enough to be visible through his skin, so today he’s coming in with you.  The last time you brought him into a public establishment, he was sleeping in your arms and no one paid much mind.  You’re a little more self-conscious now, especially after Easter.

The man taking a smoke break outside the little market with its hand-painted sign ( _Palo Groceries_ ) gives you a stern look and points to the sign on the door— _No pets allowed._

You swallow hard and try to smile.  “Sir, he’s not like a dog…you’d let me in if I had a little boy with me, wouldn’t you?”

He shrugs easily and jerks his thumb in the direction of the sign again.  “Sorry, Ma’am, but pets aren’t allowed.  Even if it _is_ well-behaved, you’ll have to leave it outside.”

You give him a stiff smile.  Your hand tightens on Silas and you can feel him looking up at you, you can feel his unspoken questions.  You open your mouth but after a while you just shake your head and say as politely as you can, “Maybe not today, then.”

You just want to  _scream_ at them--

\-- _he’s not a pet. He’s a_ _child, who thinks for himself, who can hold an intelligent conversation, who can express what he’s feeling, who can understand what is being said about him right now._

But there’s nothing to be said, not when you’re this upset, this angry.  It would come out jumbled and wrong and you can’t go through that.  Not now.  You’re afraid of what the man would have said in return, what Silas would have heard.

You’re afraid now, of how you can’t keep a straight face, of how you grip the steering wheel as though you want to choke something.  You know he’s watching you.

\--

One day in mid-December you wake up and the air outside is full of fat, white flakes.  You’re glad; Winter has always been depressing for you, and this is one of the few bright points of the season.  The appearance of snow and the promise of Christmas still awake the child in you.

It’s a little bit harder, however, to awake the child next to you.

“Silas,” you whisper, putting one hand on his shoulder.  He stirs after a little shaking, looking groggy and disgruntled. 

“Mama,” he mumbles, “ _sleep_.”

You’re not sure if it’s meant to be an order or a general statement but it’s snowing so you’ll have none of it.  You scoop him up in your arms and he flails a little but eventually settles down, clumsily rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.  You bounce him a little as you walk him over to the window.  You’re a little chilly in your nightgown but getting dressed can wait.

“Look, Silas!” You point out the window.  “It’s snowing!”

He’s decided to be contrary and instead of looking he presses his face into your shoulder and clings to your shirt, grumbling.  Honestly.  Children.

“Do you know what snow is, Silas?”  You can’t seem to recall ever reading to him about it, except maybe as a passing mention in a poem.  He doesn’t answer, but one of his ears twitches.  “It’s tiny little crystals of ice falling from the sky,” you continue, “like ice cubes but very very small and thin, like paper.  That’s why they float down from the clouds instead of dropping like rain!”

Out of the corner of your eye you can see his eyes blinking open in interest.  After a moment he lets go of your shirt and twists a little in your arms.  As soon as you’ve got him all the way turned around (something of a chore, he’s already grown quite a bit larger than the pictures of trolls you’ve seen), he stares in awe at the snowflakes drifting down outside. 

He points, mouth and eyes round in awe, and you bring him a little closer to the window, where he presses his hands against the window until mist forms a stencil of little handprints around them.

“You can go outside in it if you’re good and help me with the chores.  We’ll be done in a jiffy.”  

He bounces, half frustrated, half excited.  You let him down and go to cook breakfast, making plans for Christmas decorations.

You find more than just decorations downstairs. You’d forgotten about the old record player, or at least put it out of you mind.  You tried to put most of the wedding presents out of your mind.  But you promised yourself you’d stop worrying about that so you bring it upstairs along with Sinatra’s 1957 Christmas album. 

This is another first for Silas.  Although you’re sung for him before, he’s never heard recorded music from a cassette or record, and you can think of no better way to introduce him to it than with Frank Sinatra.

Soon the first melodious notes of Jingle Bells fill the house (you wince and turn it down a bit) and the two of you dance your way through washing the dishes and Windexing the windows.  Silas is very good throughout the whole endeavor, only sparing one or two longing glances towards the nearest window.

Putting away the last of the cleaning supplies, you realize that you never bought boots for Silas…but then again you’re not really sure he even needs shoes.  While cold weather seems to bother him more than the heat, the skin on his feet is getting very tough.   

This also means he’s getting less ticklish there, but since pupation the raw spots on his sides have healed and fortuitously become better tickling targets than feet or armpits.  You have only to crawl your fingers slowly towards his ribs and he’ll start squeaking and giggling.

You might as well be tickling him for the amount of squirming he does when you’re getting his coat on.  As soon as all the buttons are done, he’s through the door like a shot.  You got his shoes on him but you’re sure they’ll be soaked and full of snow in a minute’s time. 

Silas is tentative at first, shuffling in the inch of snow already covering your little yard.  Then he kicks it gently, watching the snow fly into the air.  It’s still warm enough that the snow is packable and you can’t resist following him out into the yard, still in your slippers and robe, and make a snowball with your bare hands. 

You throw it at Silas as gently as you can, the snowball turning to powder as it connects with his shoulder.  He squeaks at the faint impact and turns around to see you balling another handful of snow. 

It doesn’t take him long to pick up the art of snowball-making, and soon playful tossing escalates the best snowball fight of your life.  You jog around the yard, making sure to stay within range as he laughs and shouts breathlessly, chasing you with hastily-gathered handfuls of snow.

Inside, Ol’ Blue Eyes starts crooning, _“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…”_

__

\--

You’re short on money, so this year Silas gets one book of his choice at the local second-hand store, and couldn’t be happier.  It’s a book of poems, and although his best pace is currently about two words per minute he insists on reading them aloud to you.

You don’t mind.  You wonder whether he knows this is simply the best Christmas present he could possibly give you.

\--

You avoid family gatherings for another full year, until the winter of ’62, when Mama and Patricia come to talk a couple weeks after Thanksgiving.

You’re surprised it took Mama this long, but you’re still not prepared for the inevitable talk.  It gets harder every time to talk about Silas with other people in the neighborhood, especially given how big he’s getting.  Especially now that he’s starting to understand what’s being said about him.  He can say a lot now--he’s gotten so good at talking—but you’re certain he understands even more.

If there’s one impossible thing you want, it’s for him to never let other people convince him he’s an animal.  And it hurts more than words can describe, because you know now that’s exactly how the rest of the world sees him.

So you’re not ready for the visit, and especially not for Patricia, but she’s probably here because she feels responsible for your…”problem”.  But you’re never going to be ready anyway, so you invite them inside for tea, put the kettle on, and sit down across from them in the living room.

“…You’ve been cleaning,” says Mama into the silence.  You nod and join them in looking awkwardly around the room, avoiding eye contact.  It’s true, the floor is freshly vacuumed and you dusted for hours yesterday, lifting Silas with a feather duster to get the corners.

“How have you been since…since Easter?” asks Mama.  You swallow your frustration with her inability to get to the point and start to reply, but before you can spend more than a few words on how you’ve been since Easter, Silas trots into the room with a book under one arm.

Ah.  Well, that’s one way to address it.

“Come here, honey,” you say, pretending your heart isn’t pounding in your throat.  You absolutely can’t let him think you’re ashamed of him.  It’s more important than anything right now, and you wish that didn’t mean _more important than your mother’s approval_ , but Silas saved you and Mama…

Mama doesn’t understand.  And she didn’t understand when you were deep in that awful gray nothingness that followed the divorce.  It’s not her fault, but it wasn’t yours either, and you’re tired of the whispers, the glances, the implicit blame.

When you pick up your son, the two women across from you share a significant look and you wonder whether he notices.

“Rosa,” says Patricia, very low and serious.  She’s looking at Silas, not you, but he stares right back and after a moment she blinks, shifting uncomfortably.  She looks at you instead.  “We’re here to intervene.”

You find suddenly that you hate the word.  It’s a word applied to people with a problem, an addiction.  You could have used an “intervention” when you were deep in unfeeling darkness.  You could have used _help_ , something beyond “it’s over now, you don’t have to mope around anymore”. 

But Silas is the one who helped you leave that place and he became the best, most important thing in your life.  And now, you’re almost certain, they’re here to convince you to give him up.

You draw yourself up where you sit, looking at them over Silas’ head. 

“You don’t have to tell me what you’re here for and…no one’s going to take him from me.  I won’t let it happen.  And I know how you feel about what happened last Easter and I’m sorry, I’ve been teaching him not to hit, I really have.  But you saw how Augusta’s boy was acting...  And…and you would have been just as angry if someone had treated your child that way.”

Your hands are shaking; Silas takes hold of them, three fingers in each of his hands.  Across from you, Patricia stares at you as though you’ve gone mad.  Mama leans forward, brow wrinkled.

“Rosa, we’re just worried about you!  I know it’s been for you hard since…since the divorce, and Luciana—”

“Mama,” you say, trying to be patient, still trying to understand, “Lord knows I loved that child, but she was never born and you can’t keep pinning all of my problems on her.”

She looks affronted, but before she can reply Patricia starts talking again—

“Just because they look a little bit like humans doesn’t mean you can raise them as your _children_.  It used to be a big _bug_ , for God’s sake.  It’s _still_ a big bug, just with…a different body.”  She grimaces, and you hate her—you remember when that feeling used to be something dull, resentful, a reaction to her cheer and blasé attitude when you were incapable of either.  Now it’s sharp, focused, a fury that comes from the very center of you.

She looks at Silas as though he were something she would tell her husband to step on for her.

"He knows Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening by heart," you tell them, fighting to keep your voice level, and Patricia laughs.  It is not an unkind laugh, but the incredulous sound is fuel for the fire inside you.

"Rosa, parrots can memorize words,” says Mama, taking your hand with genuine concern.  ”It doesn’t mean he understands what they mean.”

You’re about to say, of course he doesn’t understand, what four-year-old has the capacity to parse through Robert Frost—it’s just so unfair—

—and then he raises a hand and says in that peculiar husky voice of his, “I think…  I think he’s ti’ed but,” he sniffles thoughtfully, then continues, “He can’t sleep.  Has stuff to do.  _To-do list_ ,” he adds, looking seriously up at you.  You taught him that one last week and you just can’t help smiling at hearing it applied to Frost.

Mama and Patricia stare—Patricia’s mouth is hanging open and Mama tries again, more weakly this time, “Rosa, you’re…you should come live with me again, you’re still young, you’re not old enough to—“

The anger in your stomach becomes a stabbing feeling in your chest and you can’t hold it in anymore.  “You _told_ me it was all right to accept a proposal right out of high school, to find a man to support me!  I wasn’t _too young_ to get married and I wasn’t _too young_ to have a child!  Everyone expected me to act like an adult but even when I tried—I _tried_ —” your voice breaks, “I wanted so badly for him to stay, I worked so hard to be perfect…”

Patricia is unimpressed.  “Yes, I heard about your breakdown…  Listen, Rosa, I’m not trying to rain on your parade but cleaning until your hands bleed isn’t—”

“He didn’t want to be married to a woman who couldn’t have children.”  Your voice is thick but you say it loudly enough for both of them to hear.  There’s a long pause.

“Now, Rosa, I’m sure—”

“He told me so,” you say flatly.  “There was nothing to, to misinterpret.  Mama…”  Fresh tears start rolling down your face when you address her, because it makes you feel like a little girl, you are so young, you just want her to understand.  “…it broke me somehow when I lost the baby.  Inside, I mean.  I…wasn’t right for a long time.  And I couldn’t fix myself.  If I didn’t have Silas…”

 _I wouldn’t be here now_ , you finish with absolute clarity, and the thought is like a blow to the stomach.  The truth of it rings in your mind, makes you almost dizzy.

“Rosa,” says your mother softly, and you can see she still doesn’t understand.  Next to her, Patricia sighs through her nose, uncomfortable and annoyed.  You can’t bring yourself to say anything more, you just hold onto Silas as tightly as you can and shoosh him as he squirms in your lap, reaching for your tear-stained face. 

In the kitchen, the teakettle starts to whistle.

\--

It’s seems obvious after they leave that they won’t be coming back.  By Spring, your allowance has been cut off.  It’s time for you to start looking for a real source of income.

You remember your mother opening up the spare bedroom for boarders when you were young, and the variety of people who passed through the house in the following years.  Some of them were nice, and others…

Papa once threw a man out after two days when the boarder wouldn’t stop addressing him as—well, any number of words, the full meaning of which you never understood until later.   Even so, you recognized the hate behind them somehow, and later you came to understand the nature of that hate, how it was so widespread that there was no real fire in its language, just an easy issuance of _greaseball_ , _dago_ , _wop_. 

You’re scared that Silas will have to hear those same things— _animal, pet, just a troll_ —because you remember how embarrassed you were to go home after that and hear Italian everywhere, how you didn’t want to be…what you are.

You don’t want that for him.  You won’t let that happen.

But you need the money so you put an ad in the paper and Silas helps you set up a bedroom downstairs.  In order to make room, you have to bring up everything else still collecting dust down there, and then you realize those can be sold too…

In the end, one of the few things you end up keeping are the cheap romance novels you bought in your high school years.  They were checked out in strict confidence by a school friend working the counter at the local used books store. 

You’re just cracking open _“Eternal Lover”_ ( _One dark night of passion, and she was his for a sinful eternity OF LOVE_ ) when Silas, carrying a pile of old cushions, emerges from the stairwell and looks up at you curiously.  In that same instant you remember what’s on the cover of the book and shut it hurriedly, trying to find a way to hold it away from him that doesn’t look too suspicious.

He sniffs—he’s had something like a head cold for a couple of days now.  “Mama, is a new book?”

“Is _that_ a new book,” you correct him, hoping to change the subject.

“Mama, is ‘at a new book?”

You smile weakly.  “There are a lot of books from downstairs you haven’t read yet!  Why don’t we go take a look at them?”

He nods, but keeps glancing at the novel you’re holding far too conspicuously behind your back.  The yard sale goes well enough considering most of the objects for sale have been in a basement for over a year, and by the end of it your embarrassment has faded and you have enough money to buy groceries for another two weeks—three if you stretch it.

With that under control, your only concern right now is Silas, whose head cold has started getting worse.  You put him to bed early that night after taking his temperature, but you think you’re starting to recognize familiar symptoms.

Your suspicions are confirmed when you find the rashes on his back and shoulders the next day, and you think maybe taking on boarders can wait until the chicken pox is gone. 

He sniffles in bed next to you, bleary-eyed, the picture of misery, and you gently explain to him that Mama once had this too and he’s going to be just fine, but he shouldn’t scratch.  He grumbles at that, but soon he’s asleep again and you quietly go to the kitchen to see how much money you can put aside for chicken soup.  Chicken soup for chicken pox, Papa used to say.

He likes the soup.  Unfortunately, it seems to be the one bright spot in the worst days of his life so far.  You remember all too well what it’s like and you’re careful to give him plenty of warm baths and blankets that won’t irritate the already sensitive skin. 

When he starts scratching compulsively, you put your old oven mitts onto his hands—they are much too large and he is sullen about the whole ordeal.  Even when you explain that Mama had to wear these too when she had chicken pox, he seems convince that you would have looked much better in them.

The level of discomfort will level out, you keep telling yourself.  It did for you, and he’s even younger than you were when you got the pox.  He’ll be fine. 

Instead, it only intensifies.  There are some nights where you can barely get him to sleep, and some nights when he’ll only sleep in the bath.

It’s on one of these nights that the worst part begins.  These days you can barely sleep either, so it’s midnight and you are awake in the living room, one yellow lamp illuminating the pages of _Eternal Lover_.  You’re halfway through the obligatory scene of vampiric debauchery, blushing a little even though worry is eating at you, when Silas walks in.

You look up, about to suggest another bath, and end up staring in horror.

He’s got his shirt pulled all the way up and the some of the rashes on his stomach are bleeding and he’s crying.  And you have no idea what to do or how to help him.  You’ve already done everything you can think of and he’s still here in front of you, his face streaked with red tears.  He’s still scratching continuously, painfully, obviously unable to stop, so you do the only thing you can think of.

He doesn’t struggle at first when you take hold of his arms and pull him down to sit on your lap, but after a moment he starts pulling weakly at your grip.  He’s always so tired these days and you can feel his fever even now.

“Mama, let go,” he says, dragging out the last word in a tearful way that makes you feel like a vice is squeezing your heart.  You didn’t know anything could hurt so badly, you’ve never wanted so much to take on someone else’s pain. 

He strains again and the feeling in your chest redoubles.  You drop your head to his, cheek pressed to his sweaty hair, and manage to sound firm while your throat tightens around the words, “Scratching will only make it worse, honey.  You can’t scratch.”

“But it itches!” His voice is a tight little wail, and you hold his hands still while he writhes and you hate yourself more every second.  You just want this to end, you want him to be okay again.

“Silas,” you say desperately, “Silas, listen to me, shoosh…”  His protests die down obediently into slow, hiccupping sobs.  He doesn’t stop pulling, though, and you have to fight to keep your voice steady.  “Do you remember when—when we were at the store and I was angry at that man?”

He sniffs, nods, whines again.  You continue hastily, “People like that, they’re…they’re like your itches for me, okay?  Mama really… _really_ wants to be mean to them, did you know that?”

He sniffs and relaxes a little, pulling one hand instead towards his face.  You let him wipe his nose on his sleeve just this once, then take his hands in yours again.  “Mama?” he says quietly, “did you wanna beat ‘m up?”

You smile ruefully.  “I really did, honey.  And if anyone ever hurt you, you bet I’d beat them up.  But saying mean things just because someone else did, that’s just like scratching your itches, it doesn’t make things any better.  They would just be mean right back, right?  You can show them you’re better than that, can’t you?”

He gives you a small, miserable nod.  You run both thumbs along his knuckles and kiss the top of his head and murmur, “You’ll feel better soon, I promise.  I promise, honey.  I’ll be with you the whole time.”

By the end of the week, the itchy rashes are painful blisters.  He’s no longer scratching, but for another four or five days you’re consumed by the dilemma of whether to take him to a doctor or a vet, whether either one would know how to treat Silas.

You give him cool cloths for his fever and chicken soup, and you force yourself not to hug him and cause even more pain.

Eventually, the virus starts to ease again, after over twenty days of suffering.  The itching returns as the sores dry but you only know because Silas mentions it to you one day.  You tilt your head to one side and say, “But you’re not scratching them?”

“No, because, I know better.  Mama, can read a book?”

“Only if you can finish this line,” you say, and he smiles expectantly, hopping up on the chair next to yours. 

One foot working the pedal of your ancient sewing machine, you start, _“In winter I get up at night, and dress by yellow candle light…”_

He replies immediately, his words still a little clumsy, “ _In Summer, quite ‘a other way, I haveta go to bed by day_ , can we read now?”

You set aside the blouse you were mending and stand up, ruffling his hair.  “And that poem is called?”

“Bed in Summer,” he says promptly.

“Good job!  Now, what would you like to read?”

\--

_And does it not seem hard to you,_

_When all the sky is clear and blue,_

_And I should like so much to play,_

_To have to go to bed by day?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The positive reception of this story has been such a relief and an encouragement. You are all fabulous and I can't wait to share more with you. In the next chapter a few more canon characters will appear and I'm sure everyone will be pleased to hear that this was the last of Patricia.  
> Sylphee's original posts:  
> http://sylphee.tumblr.com/post/61845552578/mothers-day  
> http://sylphee.tumblr.com/post/65071259930/you-just-want-to-scream-at-them-sometimes-hes  
> (I borrowed the prose from this as well as basing my illustration off of her art, so credit to her! It's been a really Sylphee-heavy chapter, haha~)  
> Papers' original post (submitted to my tumblr):  
> http://toastyhat.tumblr.com/post/73284118723/i-sorry-no-no-sshh-it-is-perfect-omg-mitts


	4. The Claws that Catch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time passes and it becomes clear that some members of the community are more accepting than others, and some, like that Makara boy, are just plain unnerving. A Mr. Zahhak moves into the neighborhood and Silas walks to the library on his own for the first time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Four of course owes its title to Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. At least last chapter got a cheerful title...  
> Horuss Zahhak has his own place in the UFUT/Loophole universe and appears here with credit to coldhope, who was kind enough to let me insert him, and saccharineSylph, who gave me a little info on his character and history.  
> The last scene of this chapter comes from a comic Paperseverywhere started drawing on a stream a while ago, and she is also a guest illustrator in this chapter, neatly halving the amount of effort I had to put into art as well as increasing the quality of the art by about 300%. Thank you, Papers, you are basically the best!

Your son grows fast.

You’ve lost count of how many poems Silas knows by heart, and he actually knows what all of them mean now.  There’s only one he won’t read again— _Death of a Hired Man_ by Frost, the protagonist of which shares his name.  At thirteen, he tells you very seriously that _Stopping in the Woods on a Snowy Evening_ isn’t really about a man trying to take his horse home at all, it’s actually a “metapore”.  His explanation is curtailed by a brief lesson in pronunciation.

You’ve adjusted to life with a troll son.  Your mental map of the little neighborhood is separated into places where Silas can go in and places where “pets are not allowed”.  The neighborhood changes around you but the same old librarian—a Mrs. Belfast—still works the desk and she still gives Silas a piece of candy when he checks out his books. 

They talk about what he’s getting today, what he might get next time, whether he enjoyed the books from last time.  Sometimes, Mrs. Belfast will waive late fees.  You’re grateful for this, and you’ve tried to tell her as much but she just smiles and says she knows he’d never keep an overdue book on purpose.

You listen to the radio together.  You listen to the news of the war in Vietnam, to the President’s speeches, to all the news—most of it bad.  On one occasion, a friendly neighbor invites you over to watch the news on his TV, but there are cameramen in the war zones now and the footage is too disturbing. 

And of course you took Silas, you couldn’t leave him alone in the house...  He has nightmares for weeks.  You comfort him and pretend your dreams haven’t been similarly horrific.

Silas hears about Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio and though you haven’t been good about keeping up with current events, you explain the situation as best you can.  That King is a preacher who wants people to treat each other the way they should, and he makes speeches, and if he’s ever on the radio you’ll play the broadcast for Silas.

This only happens once, but it couldn’t be clearer that your son feels as though he’s being addressed specifically.  None of the equality debates have anything to do with trolls but in Silas’s eyes you can see something growing.  Watching him, you feel both pride and fear.

Dr. King is shot when Silas is seven.  He cries for hours while you hold him and rub his back.  Later, he asks you quietly to read to him and you start—

“ _Whose woods these are I think I know.  His house is in the village, though…”_

When you read the last lines he cries again, and you understand now; you don’t have to ask to know why.

In ’73, the old man who ran Palo Groceries retires, and his son takes over.  The No Pets Allowed sign is gone the next time you pass the store.  When you tentatively enter, Silas’s hand clutched tight in your own, the man behind the counter welcomes you both inside. 

His daughter, a dark-haired girl with stitches marching up a healing split in her upper lip, shyly fetches cans of tomato soup for you.  She’s not so shy in looking at Silas, but to your relief her interest seems innocent.  Silas, for his part, is uncharacteristically reserved, practically standing behind you to avoid the little girl’s gaze.

Soon, though, he won’t be able to hide behind you at all.  You’ve given up on the idea that he might stay small and childlike forever, like the trolls in the Crocker pamphlets.  You don’t know whether it has something to do with the fact that his blood color is “off-spectrum” or whether there’s just something different about how they raise trolls in captivity, but the fact is that he’s growing just like any normal human boy would.

And before you know it, it’s 1975.

\--

“Silas!”

He’s on the living room floor, reading.  No answer.  You sigh and try again.

“Silas!”

“What, Mama?”

“I told you these cookies were for dinner tonight!”

“Yes?”

You frown and put your head around the corner, waving the empty cookie plate in one hand.  “Silas, I’m disappointed.  I don’t know how you stomached all of them in one night, but—”

“It wasn’t me,” he says, forehead wrinkling.  “They’re _all_ gone?”

“Don’t interrupt me, young man.”

“Sorry, Mama, but it really wasn’t me.”

You weren’t expecting him to persist in denying it—Silas can be stubborn and overly-serious but he doesn’t lie.  Is there something you’re missing, something else he might be concealing?

“Maybe it was the raccoon,” he volunteers, and you sigh.  It’s true, some animal has been stealing from your garbage cans recently, but…

“There’s no way a raccoon could get in the house, and even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t stop at a plate of cookies,” you say patiently.  Silas squints, thinking, and then nods.

“You’re right, raccoons are smart but one couldn’t undo the latch inside the window.”

“The window?”

“There’s a weird smell around it,” he says, as though it’s obvious.  “The whole kitchen smells weird, but the window especially.  Weird and sour.”

You withdraw into the kitchen and take a deep breath.  There...might be something.  Your nose tingles faintly.  After a moment you step back out and say, “That is strange.  I’m sorry, Silas, my nose isn’t as good as yours…  Can you tell what it is?”

He shakes his head, closing his paperback on a bookmark and climbing to his feet.  In another minute he’s standing by the window, inhaling deeply through his nose.

“It’s weird, it’s like…  You know, before a storm, when you can smell the lightning?”

“No,” you say, and his face falls a bit.

“Oh...well…it smells like that.”

“That,” you say very carefully, “is an odd thing to say.  But whatever’s happening, I believe you.  I want you to find out how the cookies vanished, though.”

“Catch the raccoon, you mean?” he asks, eyes widening.

“Yes, the raccoon that smells like lightning,” you say a little drily.  Silas doesn’t seem to be discouraged by your tone, or even notice it.  If anything, he looks excited.

“Mr. Talbot next door said he wanted to trap it and shoot it.  Maybe we can save it and find another place for it to live!”

“Well it’s not living with us,” you say as gently as you can.  “It’s like the cats, Silas, we don’t have the money for it.”

“Right,” he mumbles.  You think he probably still feels guilty about Miss Wesson, the last boarder, whose allergies made living with Silas’s adopted cats unbearable. Now the cats are gone, but you’re still between boarders.

You ruffle Silas’s hair, still thick as it was when he was young, but with a coarse layer growing under the old fluff.  When he looks up at you, you can see the bright scarlet in his irises when they catch the light right.  Sometimes you wonder if he’ll be taller than you in another couple of years.

“Go on, then,” you say.  “Figure it out.  It’s about time I stopped having to set the garbage cans right-side-up every morning, in the cold no less.”

“Right!”  He runs in the direction of his room, presumably to fetch his little red notebook.  He generally reserves it for poetry, which you are sadly “not allowed to read”.  You miss the days when he would read it aloud for you, but he’s fourteen now and you’re trying to give him his space.

It’s hard, though, with pride expanding in your chest until you feel you’re going to burst.  Some things don’t change.  Every time he learns something new, every time he grows up a little bit more, your heart tightens in your chest and you’re consumed with the urge to hold him tight and not let go. 

Quite often, you fail to resist the urge.  He’ll never be too old for hugs.

\--

The snow melts and the skies clear and the raccoon is still not caught.  Nor does it return for more cookies, however, and so that particular incident remains unsolved.

In the early spring, when the mornings are still frosty, there is a day when you walk to the grocery store instead of driving.  Silas is old enough by now to be trusted at home alone, and you could use the exercise in the fresh air.

As you draw closer to the store, you notice something beyond it, down the street—a row of dark blocks, vehicles, maybe.

When you get closer, you see trucks, and around them men, talking in businesslike voices and carrying furniture.  By the time you reach the store, you can see the man directing the flow of traffic in and out of the house.

He’s not one of the workers, though he could probably help with the lifting.  He’s heavyset, his skin a little darker than yours, and his hair is pulled back in an inky black ponytail.  He’s wearing a pair of dark, round glasses.  The house he seems to be moving into is the largest on his block—seemingly too large for one occupant—but the number of moving trucks queuing up outside it suggests that it will soon be very full.  

When he meets your gaze you realize you’ve been staring and hurriedly give him a smile and wave.  He nods, once, and looks away.

The neighbors in general seems suspicious of the newcomer—what kind of a name is _Horuss Zahhak_ anyway, they ask, and is he going to invite anyone to visit, and is that some kind of workshop he’s setting up in his garage?  Next to his expensive foreign car?  Why did he come here in the first place if he can afford expensive foreign cars?

You don’t see him again until a couple of weeks later, this time inside the store.  Watching him out of the corner of your eye, you think he seems out of place, somehow.  It’s not that he’s preposterously large, it’s just that he moves with a peculiar delicacy, as though he’s afraid of bumping into or breaking anything.

A while ago you would have avoided making any kind of contact with a stranger, especially one as, well, _strange_ as this.  But you were new to the neighborhood once and for all his imposing size and grim face, he seems almost shy.

So you approach him after you’ve finished paying and say, “Hello, my name is Rosa Maryam.  You’re Mr. Zahhak, right?”

He gives you another long look.  “…Yes.”

You swallow hard and make yourself keep talking—there’s a chance you’re just misinterpreting his behavior.  “If you’re having any trouble settling in, you’re more than welcome to visit some time.”  (Actually, offering makes you a little nervous because you’re never sure how visitors will react upon meeting Silas, but it’s the polite thing to do.)

His expression seems to soften a little, and then his brows furrow.  “Well, it’s been a busy week and—”

“Miss Maryam is the best!” says the dark-haired daughter of the store owner, appearing suddenly at Mr. Zahhak’s elbow. 

He turns abruptly and for a second you think he’s going to knock her over by accident, but she raises one arm to steady him and says, as though nothing happened, “You really ought to get to know people better.  Name's Dessie Palo and I’m shop assistant here.  If you wanna find a ladyfriend in the neighborhood, just ask me, awright?”

Dessie grew up in the town but from what her father’s told you, summers spent on a farm down in Tennessee have contributed to the thick Southern drawl that creeps into her voice when she gets excited.  Surprisingly, though, the scar on her lip doesn’t seem to impede her speech at all.  Despite the fact that it’s offset from the middle of her lip, it still gives her the look of a cat, all big, curious green eyes and playful energy.

Mr. Zahhak seems unsure of how to deal with her.  “Well,” he says, and then, again, “well—“  He stiffens and adjusts his glasses, giving you both a bright, overly-wide smile.  “I really should go.  Lots to…a lot of…”

“Come again!” Dessie chirps as he mumbles his way out the door, and then, once he’s gone, “He reminds me of the horses on the farm--big and scary-looking but gentle, really.”

In any other situation you’d tell her gently that it’s rude to compare someone to a horse, but in this case it’s so shockingly apt that you can only nod.

As you leave, someone else brushes past you in the doorway—a tall boy with dark, curly hair.  Before the door closes, you hear, _“Morning, Dess’, you look—“_

You’ve seen that boy before occasionally, but never in this part of town.  Did he come all the way down here just to talk to Dessie?  It seems odd to you that he would know her, and even odder that he would know her well enough to have a nickname for her. 

You share your musings with Silas when you get home but rather than contributing his own thoughts he gives you an almost alarmed look and hurries to his room.  He only emerges again when you tell him firmly that he won’t get any dinner if he doesn’t come to the table.

You liked it better when you didn’t know enough about trolls.  Now you just feel like you don’t know enough about your son.

\--

This feeling is reinforced the next day, when you mention to Silas that he needs a haircut and he grimaces, mumbling something about how he likes his hair this way.  And when you ask him why, he flushes and says, “It’s softer!”

You didn’t know that was important to him, but apparently it is so you let the matter rest—for the most part.  You still get him into a folding chair in the kitchen and trim the shag hanging down over his eyes, and he looks disgruntled but sits still.  Later, though, his mood lightens a little and you play jacks on the living room floor together.

In fact, his sullen behavior only returns the next week, when you wake him up for an early run to get bread and milk.  He fusses with his hair all the way to the grocery store, only stopping the moment you open the door and the little bell rings in the back of the shop.

The first thing you see is the tall boy who walked past you as you were leaving on your last errand.  At first you can’t hear what he’s saying but after a moment his voice explodes into what sounds like a very loud punch line—“— _AND THE DUCK SAYS, GOT ANY GRAPES?”_

You ignore this as best you can, even the raucous laughter that follows.  Beside you, Silas seems to be having a little more trouble.  He keeps glancing past the shelves in the direction of the boy’s voice, scowling a little.  And when you go up to the counter he hangs back. 

Behind the counter, Dessie steps away from her visitor, looking more than a little relieved, and starts sorting through the groceries.  The tall boy glances at you, and then over your shoulder.  You watch him a little anxiously out of the corner of your eye as he walks past you.  He stops a couple feet from Silas and bends down, twisting his head a little to get a better look. 

“Hello,” says Silas evenly.  “My name’s Silas Maryam, what’s yours?”

The other boy doesn’t answer at first, just draws back a little and keeps observing.  Then he extends one pale, bony hand and although the movement is slow you’re oddly unnerved by it, as though it could turn from a friendly gesture into a slap at any second.

“Carlos Makara,” he says softly.  “What are you, little guy?”  It’s a rude question, but you tell yourself at least he’s asking Silas.  Most people with questions about your son turn immediately to you— _Why is he so big?  Is that a troll?  How much did it cost?_

Silas shakes the other Carlos’s hand firmly and says, “I’m a troll.  A lot of trolls act like animals because people treat them that way, but we’re just as smart as humans.”

“Did Mommy tell you that?” asks Carlos sharply, and his voice is tight now as though he’s holding down another explosion of laughter like the one you heard earlier.

“No.  I figured that out on my own.” 

You smile to yourself and rummage in your purse.  You shouldn’t have worried—Silas has a gift for keeping his head under pressure.  Though if he starts another debate with a complete stranger, you might have to intervene before it gets too heated.  The last man he argued with in public couldn’t keep up with Silas’s reasoning and got…belligerent.

Carlos just says, “You’re funny for now, kid.  See you later.” 

And then he’s gone and Dessie, handing you your change, says, “Finally!”

“You don’t like him?”  The question is quick, almost eager.  You narrow your eyes at Silas as he comes forward to stand beside you, and although he leans on the counter as though to take one of the grocery bags, he just stops there, resting on his elbows, watching Dessie’s face.

“Naw…” she says, the sigh turning the word into a drawl.  “I think he likes me, though.  Hey, c’mere, you!” 

And she leans over the counter to ruffle his hair, the way she does…every time…they see each other…  As Silas starts purring, you have a sudden flash of insight that leaves you equal parts delighted and terrified.

“Mama wanted to give me a haircut,” he tells her, his words oddly distorted by the rumbling in his throat.

She looks a little bit crestfallen but says, “Well, that’s okay too…  I think you’d look real nice with short hair anyway, and she is your mom after all.”

Silas gives you a rueful glance, which you answer with the most knowing smile you can manage.  He goes red all the way to the tips of his ears.

“So, Dessie,” you say sweetly, picking up the bag with the bread in it, “you wouldn’t want to go steady with that Carlos boy?”

“Oh, ‘course not."  Dessie makes a face, “You know, he gets so loud sometimes…  I think I’d go deaf if I spent too much time around him!"

You nudge Silas.  He shakes his head almost imperceptibly, ears twitching the way they always do when he’s embarrassed.  But you don’t mention it on the walk home and by the time you reach the house his face is its usual gray and he’s smiling a little.

You squeeze his shoulder.  “We can do the haircut later if you like, honey.”

“No,” he says, and gives you a crooked little smile that seems older than him somehow.  “I don’t think it really matters that much.  And it’s getting harder to wash, anyway.”

“Alright.  You set up in the kitchen again and I’ll get the kit.”

It’s not the best haircut you’ve ever given, but he smiles at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and thanks you.

\--

You weren’t expecting to talk to Horuss Zahhak again.  Even when you see him around the Palos’ store he doesn’t so much as look at you, seeming more inclined to talk to Dessie.  You’re secretly a little bit relieved—the girl is much better at making conversation than you are, and she seems to have a talent for bringing out his gentler side.  Once, you think you even see him smiling at her.

With this in mind, when an invitation to a housewarming party appears in your mailbox, you wonder whether there’s been a mistake.  But it’s definitely your name and address written on the envelope, and you feel it would be hypocritical to decline.

At five o’clock that Saturday, you leave Silas at home with a pile of freshly-acquired books and pull one of your old church blouses from the recesses of your closet.  A little more digging rewards you with a skirt to match and a gauzy, striped shawl you think you once wore to a high school dance.

You have some misgivings, of course.  You try to avoid gatherings of people as a rule and because of that you’ve never really gotten to know your neighbors.  You’re not sure how they’ll react to your presence there.

As it turns out, there aren’t that many people there anyway.  When you arrive, most of the guests are gathered around a punch bowl, chatting cheerfully about the local news.  Mr. Zahhak isn’t among them.

He is, in fact, standing awkwardly in a dark corner with a very small drink, as though this were not his house and his party.  He looks even more ominous than ever in a dark brown double-breasted suit, and as you approach he pats his forehead with a kerchief—his face is shiny with sweat and creased with some kind of deep solemnity.  He does seem to brighten a little when he sees you, which is unexpected but encouraging.

“Maryam,” he rumbles, and finishes his drink in a hasty gulp.  “Would you like a tour of the house?”

You say yes, of course.  It’s less a tour of the house and more a tour of Mr. Zahhak’s belongings.  The house practically smells of old money—the furniture, the rugs, the big books in their cases…  Everything is richly decorated, well-cared-for but worn. 

The only exception is the workshop he seems to have set up in one side of his spacious garage.  You stare in wonder at the assortment of tools on the wall, the piles of robotic pieces and parts—gears, springs, pistons, axles—strewn across the bench.

“—No,” says Mr. Zahhak, “I haven’t finished setting up out there yet…come along, this is much more interesting.”

The “much more interesting” thing is apparently in a varnished mahogany case on the walled veranda.  As you approach it, squinting to see inside, Mr. Zahhak takes out a small silver key.  After a little delicate fiddling, he opens the case and the glass door squeaks—a long, whining sound more piercing than any noise you’ve ever heard a set of hinges make.  As a guest, you refrain from commenting but you hope he plans to oil it soon.

“These belonged to my father before me,” he says.  “Fully functional family heirlooms.  The Zahhak men receive training in rifle use from a very early age.”

Your eyes slide over a set of sleek, beautifully-crafted guns, each with a blue symbol inlaid into the stocks—a simple arrow with a crossbar through it.  You reach out to touch one of them, then think better of it. Mr. Zahhak notices.

“The symbol of the archer and the horse,” he says, proudly.  “Greek, of course, but my ancestors were well-traveled and they must have found it appropriate.”

You envy him a little, you think.  However he was raised, it’s clear he never felt ashamed of his heritage. In that regard, he would probably be a better role model for Silas than you are.

It’s only a passing thought, not one you really intend to act on, but it does give you reason to pause and say, as he closes the case with that long, awful whine, “Could I bring Silas with me to visit some time?”

Mr. Zahhak frowns.  “The overgrown troll you’re always with?  My apologies, Maryam, but animals are not my favorite visitors.  Especially the ones that look almost human—monkeys, for instance.  Monkeys have always—”

You interrupt him in your eagerness to correct him.  “No, no, he’s just as intelligent as any human boy!  More so, in fact.  If you’d just talk to him some time I’m sure you’d get along.”

Somehow, you’re expecting this to be like the rest of the man’s personality; a façade of reluctance hiding at least some degree of warmth or compassion.  Instead, he gives you a worried look from behind those round, black glasses.

“Maryam, you can’t grow too attached to a pet.  I’m sure you’re very proud of what words he’s learned but if you start treating animals like children…  Well, actually, if you get too affectionate in any way—I had an uncle who is an excellent example of this, and you have to realize this happened in a different century…”

You watch him leave the room, only following when he turns to see whether you are.  You don’t hear much of what he says after that; everything seems unimportant compared to the odd, hollow feeling in your stomach.  You don’t stay at the party much longer.

Later, you hear that Mr. Zahhak vanished around seven o’clock, leaving the remaining guests to do as they please, and you wonder, uncharitably, what on earth is wrong with that man.  Every habit of his that seemed at first understandable now becomes abhorrent.

On your mental map of the neighborhood, you cross off another house.

\--

“Come on, Mama, I’ll be fine!  I don’t have to go everywhere with you, you know.”

“Silas, we’ve talked about this.  You can’t walk to the library on your own.  It’s too far away!”

He looks upset but takes a deep breath through his nose and says calmly, “Mama, I’m fourteen!  The most people have ever done is give me funny looks and mutter to each other, but I’m used to that and I have a library card _and_ Mrs. Belfast knows me!  I really will be fine.”

You lock eyes for a long moment, which is more than long enough for you to tell how badly he wants this.  You sigh and sit back, half-smiling, and he grins at you.

“…Alright, honey, but— _but_ —you have to come back by exactly five, alright?  I’ll give you my watch.  Remember how long it takes you to walk there?”

“Ten minutes,” he says promptly.

“Good boy.  Remember your bag.  And take a water bottle, it’s hot out today!”

“Mama, you worry too much!”  He’s already pulling on his shoes—he must have had them ready.  Are you really that much of a push-over?

“Just be careful,” you say, a little weakly.

“I’ll be fine!” he calls, halfway out the door.  And then he’s gone, and you keep reading your book—a little exasperated and a little worried and a little proud.

For all that you’re worried, though, you end up absorbed in your book, and after a while you stop checking the clock.  Until, that is, the sound of someone shouting outside in the street rouses you and you look up to find that it’s 5:05.

You get up, trying not to panic, and slide on your sandals.  You’ll just go out and wait on the porch, and he’s sure to be coming down the street in no time.  Then you can make dinner and let him read at the table this once—

…but first you’re going to tell those boys to quiet down.  There’s a time and a place for horseplay, and outside your house at five in the afternoon is neither the place nor the time.

When you open the door, prepared to give them a stern talking-to, you don’t understand exactly what’s happening at first.  But your mind still immediately throws up the crystal-clear memory of your blond nephew tugging at Silas’s ear.

You start running.

The boys—three of them, gathered around a hunched form on the street—see you coming and immediately take off.  One of them shouts, “Can’t catch us, Old Maid Maryam!”  Sternness be damned; you’re flushed red, shouting after them as they run, _“How could you, don’t you have any human decency?  Your parents would be ashamed!  If I see you around here again I’ll—_ “

But the words die in your throat as you drop to your knees next to your son.  You gather him into your arms, staring after the fleeing, laughing gang of boys, and feel him curl closer to you, clinging to your shirt. 

[ ](http://toastyhat.tumblr.com/image/75217815857)

Through a haze of angry tears, you see his face is bruised, one of his eyes blackened, his nose bleeding.  There’s bright red crusted around the corners of his mouth and you have a sudden vivid mental image of a fist colliding with his face, his lip tearing against those sharp teeth—

Nausea and anguish boil in your stomach and you pull Silas closer, murmuring, “I’ve got you now, honey, I’m here, it’s okay...everything’s going to be just fine.  What happened?”

He sniffs, eyes squeezed shut, and you wipe away the first trickle of red tears with a thumb.  “ _Ssshhhh,_ sshh-sshh-sshh, you’re safe now…”

“Th…they said you were crazy,” he says, breaths coming faster—you can feel him trying not to cry and it _hurts_ , far more than the words of some stupid boy.

“Did you get angry at them?” you ask, heart sinking, hating that he might think you’re asking whether it was his fault— _none of it was his fault_ , you know that—

But he’s shaking his head.  “No, I j-just—said you weren’t, I-I-I told them, that wasn’t fair, because, you’re my mom and I w-would know…”  He half-sobs.  You hold him tight and wonder how anyone could possibly fear the unknown enough to hate him.  “Mama, all I did was talk, I just wanted to—a-a-and then—I couldn’t f-fight, I was too…“

He trails off into hoarse, restrained keening, barely audible as his shoulders continue to shake violently.

“You did the right thing,” you tell him, trying to keep your voice steady.  You pull him up into your arms and lifting him with a grunt.  “— _oof_ —you’re getting too heavy to carry, honey…”

His library bag is gone.  Later, you walk back up to the library and find it on the sidewalk, books strewn across the ground.  One of them was left open and the pages are twisted and torn, a muddy boot print stamped across them.  You pay the library for it and hurry home.

Calling the boys’ parents doesn’t go over well but you can’t just sit back and act as though nothing had happened.  You won’t let your son think he means that little to you.  But the angry firmness in your voice begins to waver the longer you talk, the longer they dismiss you, the more times they tell you to keep your pets inside. 

It’s not that the anger is fading—it gets stronger with every word they say—but you’re not Silas.  You become flustered, incoherent, and eventually hang up resisting the repulsive urge to apologize.  Silas finds you later sitting at the table with your head in your hands, and you pull him into your lap when he hugs you.  You hold onto each other for a long, long time.

Later, you buy a handgun.  The man who sells it to you gives you an odd look but you couldn’t care less.  The gun goes in the back of your sock drawer.

It’s not that you want to shoot the boys who ran away from you today, but there are boys like them in the world who never grew up and walk around calling themselves men.  And if one of them ever comes to your house, you won’t let him reach your son.  No matter what.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Dessie reveals a previously unseen side of herself, Silas catches the raccoon, and the subtle machinations of troll romance come into play.


	5. The Fire of Thine Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A mystery is solved and Silas makes progress in two kinds of romance, although in one case he isn't actually aware of it. Rosa does her best to counsel him in matters of the heart, but can't say much about the diamond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Five owes its title to The Tiger by William Blake. I tried to find a poem whose overall content was more appropriate but in the end I kept coming back to "the fire of thine eyes" because that one line is so perfect. Take note that I've adjusted the previous chapter so that it's '75 instead of '76--Silas was fourteen and turns fifteen in this chapter.  
> Also people drink Ovaltine in this chapter. I find Ovaltine amusing so I thought I would mention that.  
> EDIT: Important credit!! Psiiya's character comes from SaccharineSylph--he first appeared in Loophole and she was kind enough to trust me with him. TuT

You want Silas to stay in bed but he insists on running errands with you.  At the library, Mrs. Belfast gives you both worried looks and doesn’t seem convinced by Silas’s assertions that he “fell”.  You usher him out the door wishing he hadn’t told her that—a boy as well-versed in literature as he is should have been able to recognize the cliché lie.

At least you’re sure he tells Dessie the truth. You don’t hear the conversation, conducted quietly in one corner of the shop, but when they’re done Dessie hugs him tightly and the expression on her face mirrors the pain and anger that have plagued you since yesterday. 

While the girl checks out today’s groceries, you talk to her mother.  It’s only after Mrs. Palo has vanished into the second-story apartment and Dessie is almost done counting the change that the bell rings. 

As the door opens you hear a familiar voice behind you, laughing and issuing the kind of insults young boys seem prone to throw at each other these days.  There are answering calls from outside before the door closes.

You recognize those voices from yesterday.  Beside you, Silas tenses up, staring fixedly at the floor.  You remember how you slapped your brother-in-law at the Easter party so long ago and hate yourself for not doing the same to the boys who hurt your son. 

Dessie has noticed the change in Silas’s attitude as well.  You see her look from him, to the boy who just came in, and back to Silas.  She gives you your change, and in your peripheral vision you see her march up to the boy, who has to be at least a foot taller than her, point to Silas and say innocently, “Are you the one who beat him up?”

Your head turns so fast that you almost feel your neck will cramp, just in time to see the boy nod.  He looks proud of himself.  You burn inside as he meets your eyes, and the message is horribly clear— _you’re not my mom, you can’t hurt me_.

“Gosh,” says Dessie, the word long and syrupy with sweet Southern drawl, “can I talk to you outside?”

“Sure,” says the boy, chest swelling, “I mean, he’s pretty wimpy even with those pointy teeth, it was no big deal.”

Dessie’s doesn’t stop to listen, just keeps walking so that the boy has to jog to keep up.  The bell rings softly as the door closes behind them, and in the pause that follows the boy starts to say something, inaudible beyond the glass.

He doesn’t get very far before Dessie kicks him in the shin.  Then, as he doubles over, she locks her arms around his head and starts kicking him repeatedly in the stomach.  He flails, and one blow connects but she holds on and the impact takes both of them down, Dessie twisting so that she’s on top, pounding the boy’s face with hard, sure fists.

Through a haze of amazement, you think, _She must have done this before._

You don’t move to stop her.  Silas takes a step forward, but he seems transfixed like you, and in the end it’s Dessie’s father who emerges from his office behind the desk and runs outside to haul her away from the boy, and when he smacks her across the face you have to hold on to Silas’s shoulder.  He’s shaking.

“We need to go,” you say quietly, but Mr. Palo is already heading in your direction, pulling Dessie behind him.  Her lower lip is trembling; she stares at the ground as they draw closer, not meeting Silas’s worried gaze.

In the end, it seems her father is less concerned for the boy’s well-being—apparently Silas isn’t his first victim—and more about the store’s reputation.  He apologizes to you for Dessie’s behavior and you reassure him awkwardly, not mentioning that you would gladly have taken her place.

You leave as soon as possible, but not before it’s made very clear that Dessie is once again relegated to stocking shelves and running errands—no more running the desk.  From the street outside you catch a glimpse of Mr. Palo dropping sadly to one knee to put a hand on his daughter’s head.

You don’t see Dessie for a while, not until she appears on your porch out of the blue one day in April.  Silas immediately invites her in without even asking you, but you’ll let it slide.  You have enough lunch for three.

He’s full of questions for her, shy and admiring—where did she learn to fight like that?  Did she get in a lot of trouble?  Is her papa still mad at her?

“I fight like cats do,” she says, “the big toms on our farm were always gettin’ into fights and I’d watch sometimes.  They just grab hold and keep kickin’ and they don’t let go.”

“You’re brave,” says Silas very seriously.  “Things like that…scare me.”

They scare you too.  You bite your lip and set down a glass of Ovaltine for each of them, not saying anything.

“I’ll teach you sometime!” Dessie tells him cheerfully.  “You’re only scared ‘cuz you haven’t fought a lot.”

Silas looks alarmed.  “But I don’t _want_ to fight you!”

“Aw, c’mon, a little wrestlin’ never hurt no one!”

“—I think, perhaps, wrestling isn’t quite the right way to practice,” you say hastily.  Your mind, well-schooled in romance by the collection of books under your bed, knows exactly where this scenario would be going in a narrative.

Silas looks blankly relieved, glad to have a reason not to fight the girl he likes.  Dessie, on the other hand…

Watching the girl’s face start to turn bright red, you think that maybe growing up on a farm might…accelerate a child’s education in some areas.  Hm.  “You two could still go play outside once you finish your Ovaltine,” you say, deciding it’s best to change the subject.  “Go catch a toad!”

When they come back a couple hours later, both covered in mud and carrying a plastic bucket between them, Silas is pleased as punch and Dessie’s blush is, if possible, even darker than before.  You look inside the bucket and sit back trying not to laugh.

It’s springtime, the season of new life, and all of the toads they caught are coupling.

\--

They don’t make much progress as a couple in the following months, and you’re fine with that.  They’re both still young and there are things you have yet to explain to Silas.  It’s enough that he has a friend as loyal and accepting as Dessie Palo.

Silas turns fifteen and although the most you can afford as a gift is a cheap pawnshop wristwatch, he doesn’t seem to mind.  Dessie gives him two sheets of notepaper covered in surprisingly neat handwriting, and all she says is that it’s “a story”.  You’re a little suspicious at first, but then you remember the way she blushes at the slightest mention of sex and relax.  They can have their secrets.  Children need secrets.

In the Winter they dance together to the Christmas album (it’s a tradition by now).  Silas patiently teaches Dessie everything he knows about dancing, all of which he learned from you.  And you, who were never taught how to dance in the first place, smile a little guiltily and watch them spin and stumble their way through something like a waltz.

In the spring of 1976, the wind is warm and dry and you take the opportunity to do some sorely-needed laundering.  You’re pinning damp clothes to a line outside when Silas comes outside with a pencil behind one ear and his notebook in hand.  He looks disgruntled.

“Something wrong?” you ask, and he scratches the back of his head, mouth pulling into a tight, straight line.  He waves the notebook in your direction.

“I was writing…something for…for Dessie.  Can you…?”

You try not to look too excited by the prospect of proofreading your son’s poetry—you might scare him off.  Instead you finish pinning up the last sheet, dry your hands off on your apron, and say, “Of course, sweetheart!”

When you come back outside, humming and happy and in awe of your son’s vocabulary and natural poetic talent, two of the sheets have fallen down.  You sigh and patiently go back to pick them up.  But even as you straighten back up there’s a swish and a twang and when you duck through the first line of laundry you find your favorite dress lying in the grass.

And now you know something’s wrong because it’s a light summer dress and although it’s been gusty all day, when it fell the air was still.  This isn’t the wind.

There’s another twang behind you and you whip around, staring through the gap in hanging laundry to see Silas standing in the doorway, sniffing the air.  You stride up to him, ready to issue a warning, but halfway to the house you realize he was much too far away to have had any part in pulling down your laundry.

“It’s that smell,” he says quietly.  “Like the air before a storm.”

His brain must be stuck thinking in verse.  You sigh and turn back to the laundry, searching for any sign of wooden clothespins in the grass.

And then a great gust of wind lifts all the cloth into the air like great, flapping wings and in the space beneath them you see a little gray shape with a halo of red and blue lights around its head.

Just for a split second you think it’s Silas, but just as the sheets fall, another gray shape in a white button-up shirt barrels out of nowhere and collides with the newcomer.

You hurry around the drying sheets, expecting any minute to see—two trolls fighting? Blood and tears?  Blue and red fire?

But you needn’t have worried.  When you come around the washing line there’s no scuffle, just Silas sitting next to another young troll.  You think the newcomer might be a little older, taller, but much much skinnier.  He’s dressed only in a pair of baggy brown shorts, secured to his bony hips by a length of twine.  Silas is patting his head the way he would when calming one of his adopted cats.  The skinny one looks disgruntled.

“I caught the raccoon!” says Silas triumphantly.  You watch, bemused, as he runs a hand over the other troll’s hair, which sparkles red-and-blue and stands on end as though charged with static electricity.  His eyes are pupilless, pure primary red and blue respectively, and his face is tinged yellow.  You realize he must not be red-blooded like Silas.  You completely forgot trolls could have different blood hues.

You swallow hard.  “…Are you the one who’s been stealing food?”

He doesn’t answer at first, and for that moment you think maybe he can’t talk.  Then he swats away Silas’s hand and says, “Yeah, yeah--that’th enough of _that_ , god…”

“If you want food, we can help,” you say, even though you’re not sure that’s entirely true, especially given the lack of a boarder and how infrequent sewing jobs have become.

He laughs in a way you could only describe as _impish_ , rough peals of _heheheheh!_ Interspersed with loud snorts.

“You’re being kind of rude,” says Silas, at which the other troll instantly stops laughing and mumbles, “ _I’m sorry_.”

You and Silas share a look.

“…It’s fine, honest.  Do you want to have lunch with us?” asks Silas.  “It’s better than the stuff you get out of the garbage cans.”

The yellow-blood pops up like a jack-in-the-box, suddenly all sharp movements and fang-filled smiles.  “Yes!”

His name is Psiiya, and he won’t tell you where he came from or how long he’s been on the run, but he’s more than willing to talk about just about anything else.  You thought Silas was talkative, but his poetic musing is nothing compared to Psiiya’s incessant chatter. 

He marvels about the flavor of Mac’n’Cheese, devours the broccoli while Silas picks reluctantly at his, explains at length the name, nature, and uses of his red-and-blue lights (“ _psionic_ s _, that’s p-s-i-i-o-n-i-i-c-s—I can spell!—they let me shock things and move thtuff with my brain and that’th how I got in through your windows!”_ ) and only stops talking when he anticipates any kind of reprimand, at which point he’ll shrink back and mutter an apology.

He also uses swearwords—some you’re familiar with and some you’ve never heard before, but which are _definitely_ profanity somewhere—and you can only hope he’s talking too fast for Silas to pick them up.  In that regard, the lisp also helps a little.  It’s slight, but the faster Psiiya talks the more evident it becomes—and the more his hair starts standing on end.

He’s a bit of a wild card, but you can’t help finding him endearing any more than you can help worrying about the way you can see every bone in his body.  For all that he’s been knocking over your garbage cans for months on end, he hasn’t been getting much out of them.  And he’s still growing—he needs so much more food than he’s getting…

“So,” says Silas after lunch, before you’ve started washing dishes, “can he stay with us, Mama?”

You’re not sure how you could possibly make it work, but the long and the short of it is that you can’t bear to send Psiiya away.  _You can count his ribs, for God’s sake_.

“If he wants to stay, he’s more than welcome,” you say, looking across the table at the new troll.  “It’s your choice, Psiiya.”

He chews his lip with a set of long, sharp teeth—doubled like his horns—and looks from Silas to you, and then back to Silas again.  Almost unconsciously, you think, he puts one skinny hand to the top of his head where Silas was petting his hair earlier.

“…You want me to thtay?” he asks, and you have the most peculiar impression that he means something else by it, but you can’t quite fathom it.

“Of course!” says Silas, beaming.  “I guess it might be kind of weird for you but you’ll get used to it!  Mama and I will take care of you!”

Psiiya blinks rapidly, little sparks snaking around his strange, multicolored eyes, and you think you can see his cheeks turning a patchy yellow again.

“…Fine,” he says.  “Soundth good!  Even if you do have a human lusus.  No offense,” he adds, glancing nervously at you. 

“None taken.”  _I think_ , you add to yourself.  What on earth is a lusus?  For what feels like the millionth time, you curse the complete lack of troll-related literature.

“Groovy!” says Psiiya, and holds out his plastic bowl, which he finished licking the cheese out of a few minutes ago.  “More, please!”

\--

Despite the new addition to the household, you scrape by somehow.  More children tear their clothes running around outside in the warm weather, which gives you plenty of business as the now-recognized neighborhood seamstress.  And Silas, dressed for work in a white T-shirt and blue jeans you could barely afford, wanders the street asking to weed gardens and mow lawns.  For the moment it’s enough, especially with Psiiya to help him do the heavy lifting.

Life with Psiiya isn’t bad—he’s a sweet boy, and respectful enough to you when it comes down to it—but it is…strange.  To say nothing of the way he frequently levitates furniture, usually with Silas sitting on it, or the peculiar smell you’ve finally started noticing whenever he uses his psionics, he’s just…a different kind of troll. 

You sometimes think of Silas’s behavior as being slightly different from a human’s, but Psiiya is stranger.  He’s taken to calling you “Rosamom” and although Silas has no nickname as of yet, it’s apparently a point of annoyance for Psiiya that there are only five letters in your son’s name. 

He also has a habit of patting Silas’s head the way Silas did when they first met, usually whenever Silas seems to be getting worked up about something.  At first it’s a tentative gesture, but as weeks pass he grows more enthusiastic, ruffling Silas’s hair, patting his face, and sometimes giving short, affectionate horn-rubs. 

Silas seems accepting, if bemused, and occasionally returns the gestures.  It makes you think of the way your Italian family members kiss each other’s cheeks and it’s comforting, somehow, to know Silas has a friend he can treat as family.

They hardly ever fight, for which you’re thankful.  The only real argument they have—in June—is an odd one and you’re still not sure exactly why it happened. 

Psiiya realized yesterday that he can lift electronic devices into the air and split them apart into all their little parts.  He’s working on your radio one evening—with your permission—when Silas wanders into the living room and sits down next to you.  You put aside the skirt you’ve been asked to mend and pull him down to sit, cross-legged, in front of you.  He takes your hands absently and stares down at them.

“What’s wrong, honey?”

“I feel like…”  He trails off, swallows, tries again.  “Is it weird…for a troll and a human to be together?”

Oh.

You hadn’t known he was conscious of things like this.  You’d thought you were keeping him away from it by not talking about it. 

Maybe this is the time.

You take a deep breath and hum through your nose as you exhale, lacing your fingers through his.  He turns his hands back and forth, pulling yours with them, waiting for you to finish thinking.  He knows better by now than to ask for immediate answers.

“I think…  Other people might think it’s strange,” you say carefully.  “Because it’s new.  And they don’t know any better.  You’ll have to be patient with them.”

“But if we’re not the same species—“

“Ssshhh, that doesn’t mean you can’t be in love.  You’re a boy and a girl, that’s all.  You have to believe that, Silas.  You’re a troll but that doesn’t make you any less of a person.”

It sounds cliché even to you.  You hope he knows that you mean it…but before he can respond, Psiiya wanders in.  He’s wearing one of the shirts you’ve bought him in the past year, albeit with the sleeves rolled as far up as they’ll go and the collar popped out.  You haven’t tried to correct him.

He looks from you to Silas, frowning, and says, “What’re you guyth talking about in here?”

You pat the carpet next to you.  “We were just talking about Silas’s girlfriend problems.”

He grimaces and at first you think he’s exhibiting little boys’ usual tendency to balk at any mention of romance.  But all he says is, “Why don’t you just talk to _me_ about it, Silas?”

Silas, already bothered by the use of the phrase _girlfriend problems_ , says shortly, “Why’s that?”

“Because you’re _suppothed_ to!” says Psiiya almost petulantly, taking a few sharp strides closer.  “Even if you say _girlfriend_ inthtead of _matethprit_ , that’th okay, I mean, you can explain it to me, I can thtill help you out!”

“You can’t tell me not to talk to Mama about Dessie,” says Silas, turning all the way around to look up at Psiiya.  “That’s ridiculous!”

“That’th not what moms are _for_ ,” says Psiiya, as though explaining something to a very small child.  And a small part of you says, _ooohhhh dear_ , because if there’s anything that gets under Silas’s skin it’s being talked down to.

“How would you know?  You never had a _human_ mom!”

“You may have a human mom but you’re thtill a troll,” says Psiiya stubbornly, horns sparking.  “And you should be talking this thtuff out with me!  I mean…we’re…”  He trails off and you think he must have been about to say _family_ , _brothers_ , something, and you wonder if he’s ever had anything like that in his life.

Thankfully, Silas seems to be thinking the same thing.

“…Alright,” he says gently, “come on, then, let’s talk.”

Psiiya brightens like a light switching on.  “Yeah!  So, who’s your flushcrush?”

“You met her last week,” says Silas bashfully.  “You know, Dessie…  The girl who brought the flowers…”

Psiiya stares.  And then stares some more.  The silence becomes more and more awkward as he apparently tries to process what he’s hearing.

“You and the human girl,” he says slowly, “you’re…flushed?”

Another one of those odd troll words he never explains, but this one seems self-evident.

“Well,” says Silas, his face a little bit red, “if that means…  You know, we’re going steady, kind of…”

“The hell does _going thteady_ mean?” asks Psiiya, grimacing.  He catches your warning expression and says, “I’m sorry.  Really though, human slang is so weird.”

“I could say the same of trolls,” you tell him, nudging Silas in the direction of the kitchen.  “Now, do you two want to go put the radio back together again?  I was hoping to listen to the evening news.”

“Can do, Rosamom,” says Psiiya, hopping up in that odd, jack-in-the-box way he has.  “C’mon, diamond!”

Silas starts to move and then pauses, puzzled.  “Who…me?”

Psiiya doesn’t have pupils, but if he did he would be rolling them.  His face looks yellower than usual again.  “Yes, _duh_ , you!  Come on!”

That seems to be the end of it.  The days grow shorter and darker, but the house is always alive with Silas and Psiiya’s (sometimes boisterous) adventures, and occasionally Dessie will come over to play for an hour or two. 

Psiiya doesn’t seem quite sure how to handle Dessie, but he’s definitely made it his business to facilitate Silas’s “flushcrush”.  At one point he trips Dessie with a flash of psionics, sending her pitching forward onto Silas.  You think you see what he was going for but it results only in a bloody nose and a sour end to the day. 

Psiiya takes the failure very personally, and spends an entire two hours on the roof in the cold January night.  You eventually coax him down with promises of hot chocolate, something he’s only had once before, and after that he leaves Silas and Dessie to their own devices for the most part.

In fact, there isn’t any more trouble until well into the winter, when Carlos Makara follows Dessie to your house.  She comes in, stomps the snow off of her big, iron-toed boots, and whispers something to Silas, who glances out the window.  You follow suit and see a skinny shape in dark clothes at the end of the driveway. 

The snow is a few inches deep and there’s an icy wind blowing Carlos’s black curls, but he’s wearing a baggy T-shirt.  Just the sight of someone’s bare arms in this weather is enough to make you cold.

“What’s he doing?” you ask, but Dessie just shakes her head, glaring out the window.

“Mama,” says Silas, “I want to go out and talk to him.”

“Absolutely not.  There’s something wrong with that boy.”

“I know,” says Silas, watching Carlos thoughtfully.  “That’s why I want to talk to him.  You can follow me out if it looks like I need help.  I’m not going far.”

He’s through the door before you can answer—his manners are getting lax, you think anxiously.  There was a time when he would do as he was told…

“I swear I’m going to kill Carlos if he does anything,” mutters Dessie, who is apparently not the type to _talk_ to people when she thinks there’s something wrong with them.  When it comes to your son, you can’t deny you feel the same.

Silas is barefoot in the snow, but even with shoes he would still be a head and a half shorter than Carlos.  He says something, inaudible even with the door open, and Carlos laughs, glancing at the house.  Dessie huffs in annoyance and you close the door until it’s ajar, peering through the crack.

The conversation continues, inaudible above the sound of the wind.  Even when Carlos bursts into one of his fits of volume, you can’t make out words.  But there’s definitely something changing.  Silas is constantly open--palms up, head back, shoulders relaxed—but there’s a change in Carlos--tight and hunched over at first, jaw jutting, and slowly beginning to loosen.

“What’s going on?” 

That’s Psiiya.  You glance back at him and open your mouth to explain but Dessie gets there first.

“Carlos followed me here and he was bein’ creepy out there, but Silas is tryin’ to talk him into going, look!  I just wanted to pound him, but…”

“ _Talk him into…_ ”  Psiiya frowns, pushes forward to watch through the gap in the door with you.  Out in the cold and the snow, Carlos stands almost comfortably, apparently happy to listen to Silas talk.

“What is he _doing_?” mutters Psiiya next to you.  “He should be pitch for that bathtard if anything, what is he…”

Silas pats Carlos’s shoulder in a reassuring kind of way.  Next to you there’s a gasp, a very bright flash of red and blue light, and a smell of smoke.  Alarmed, you look around to see black streaks on the wall.  The paint is bubbling in the middle of the darkest marks and Psiiya looks absolutely livid. 

Carlos steps away, apparently mollified, and ambles down the street with his fingers laced behind his head.  As Silas comes back towards the door, Psiiya turns on his heel and stalks away.

You don’t see him for a while after that.  He isn’t on the roof or under your bed, or in any of the closets.  Eventually you find him by accident when you head downstairs to pull something out of the freezer for dinner.  He’s sitting behind the freezer, bony legs folded up to his chest, looking utterly miserable.

You sit slowly down next to him, and he doesn’t look at you but he sniffles softly and dimly you see translucent yellow streaks on his face.

“I know I’m not the person you want to talk to,” you say quietly, “but if you want to explain what happened up there…I’d like to hear it.”

He doesn’t talk at first but he doesn’t tell you to go away either.  Upstairs, Silas and Dessie, whose parents have given her permission to stay for dinner, clatter around the kitchen.

When Psiiya does speak, his voice is thick and hesitant.  “…Trolls have got four different kinds of love.  Except it’th not like love the way humans do it, it’s just like, you guys need your kind of love and there’s only one of it, but we need…”  He sniffs, pulling his knees closer to his chest.  “Never mind.  I don’t wanna have to draw you a picture.  Point is, I thought he was.  I thought we were.”

You look away awkwardly.  You’ve heard about homosexuals—a zealous catholic aunt explained the concept to you once when you were a child, and your subsequent questions earned you a stinging cheek.  You haven’t had much reason to wonder about it since, but troll romance is already a little…different, you suppose.

All you know is that you’ve had unrequited crushes in the past, and the pain on Psiiya’s face is more familiar than you would have expected. 

“One of the quadrantth is all about…taking care of the other person,” he mutters, still not looking at you.  “Did you see the way he calmed down that giant bathtard?  It was just so…fucking… _pale_.  I thought I was going to puke.  Shit, I mean, darn, whatever, sorry.  Sorry.”

For a moment you consider rubbing his back the way you’d do for Silas, but think better of it.  Instead you spring up the way he does, bouncing on your toes, and say, “I’m starting to think that maybe Silas isn’t quite an ordinary troll.  I wish…that didn’t make this so hard for you.  But if you think he doesn’t understand how you feel, you should explain.  Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere.”

“This is starting to sound like a feelings jam,” Psiiya mumbles, scrubbing his stained face on his sleeve.

“Is that a…pale…thing?”

“Hn.” 

“I’m starting to think that’s what human moms _are_ for, then,” you say, and sigh when he just scowls at you.

“…Let’s go up and help them with dinner, Psii.”

He stares a little longer, and then gives you a tiny little nod and stands up, slowly this time.  As you reach the foot of the stairs, you realize that the sounds from the kitchen have subsided completely, and you slow down so as not to make any noise.  Psiiya floats up at your shoulder, and when you reach the landing both of you peer cautiously around the corner.

And then you duck back, staring at each other.  Psiiya grins incredulously, pointing, and you nod rapidly, hands clasped over your chest.  The two of you spend another half minute in silent convulsions of glee, and then you motion back down the stairs, retreating carefully.  Psiiya follows.

You give them another minute or so and then clatter back up the stairs, making as much noise as possible.  By the time you reach the kitchen, Dessie and Silas are thoroughly focused on chopping potatoes and onions respectively, a good five feet apart from each other and definitely _not_ kissing.

You glance at Psiiya and wink.  After a moment, he gives you a toothy half-smile and winks back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this point in history, the Gay Rights movement had already kind of kicked off, but Rosa has lived a fairly sheltered life and, in the interests of protecting her son, continues to do so. While she knows next to nothing about the topic, the largest difference between my Rosa and a lot of people at the time (and currently) is that she doesn't have any elbow room for fear of the unknown because she and her son are the unknown for some people.  
> On a less serious note, SilasPsiiya in this story could be called PsiiSi and that's adorable. Even if Silas doesn't know he has a moifriend.  
> Next chapter: Psiiya grows increasingly frustrated with Silas's wanton paleness while Silas goes on two dates. Mr. Zahhak asks Rosa to visit again and Rosa worries about everyone.


	6. Before I Sleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One way or another, everyone has a bad day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Six owes its title to Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost.

It’s Silas’s sixteenth birthday and the first one he’s spent away from home.

Oh, there’s a short, early, impromptu lunch party with homemade cake, and Psiiya almost makes himself sick on the first three pieces, and you measure both boys on the wall.  Psiiya’s almost as tall as you now, and while Silas will probably always be short for his age he’s definitely broader. 

You regard them wistfully for a couple of seconds, but the moment doesn’t last long because there are gifts to be given.  You couldn’t buy anything but after much deliberation, you pass on beautiful filigreed fountain pen that used to belong to your grandmother before she rid herself of worldly possessions.

Psiiya, though peeved that Silas is spending his “wriggling day” with his “matesprit” instead of at home, produces a necklace—the chain is from an old necklace of yours (taken with permission), but the pendant hanging from it is new.  It’s a warped, white crystal in the rough shape of a diamond.

“It’th _quartth_ ,” he explains proudly, “From the back yard, see.  I cut it with my psionics.”

“ _Wow_ ,” says Silas, pulling the chain over his shaggy head.  “I didn’t know you could do that, this is amazing…”

Psiiya preens a little, and you laugh, and the three of you enjoy another hour of warm comfort playing cribbage before Silas has to leave.  He’ll be staying at Dessie’s, of course.  You’re still nervous about that, especially given what happened the last time he went out on his own, but he kept insisting that he wanted to walk there, and he was going to be fine…and he has to leave the nest at some point, after all.

So you told him you trust him and reminded him not to go anywhere else, and now…

Now you sit at the dining table, working the sewing machine with one lazy foot and listening for any sound at the door.  It’s seven o’clock.

Around seven thirty you can’t take it anymore.  You got the number of the store from Mrs. Palo during your last visit, and it’s the work of a moment to dial it.  After a couple rings, there’s a click and a voice on the other end says, _“Palo Groceries, how may we help you?”_

“It’s Rosa Maryam.  I was wondering how the kids are getting along and when you were planning to send them home.”

There’s a long pause before anyone answers.

\--

When Silas finally returns, holding a cardboard token in one hand and his wet shoes in the other, you’re waiting for him.  He slides the token into his pocket as he comes in, but you hope the look you’re giving him is enough to let him know you saw.

“It’s eight o’clock,” you say pointedly.

“Yeah, sorry I’m late.”  He answers without looking at you, edging in the direction of his bedroom.

“Young man, I’m going to give you one chance to tell me the truth about where you were tonight.”

Silas freezes.

“Look at me,” you say, and then, when he doesn’t, you give the words the flinty edge that lets him know he should do as you say _right now_.   _“Silas Maryam, you look at me or so help me you will never leave this house again.”_

That’s a bit extreme, but it catches his attention and he turns around, looking at you resentfully from under lowered brows.

“Where were you tonight?”

He opens his mouth.  Shuts it again.  Looks at the floor and says, very quietly, _“Five and Dime…then skating.”_

“Thank you for telling the truth this time,” you say, as levelly as you can with hurt anger churning in your stomach.  “And how did you get there?”

_“Walked.”_

“And Dessie lied to her parents too?  They thought she was coming to our house?”  He nods.  The house swap is a trick your older sister once (almost) got away with and you remember envying her boldness at the time, wondering why your parents were so upset when they found out.

Now you understand.

“I can’t believe you walked all the way up to the Five and Dime in this weather!  And with Dessie, no less—Silas, you can’t go out with her on your own, it’s not _safe_.”

He looks up at you abruptly and you’re taken aback by his expression.  He’s angrier than you’ve ever seen him, red eyes and sharp teeth suddenly very visible.

“You can’t fucking tell me that!  Especially not when you’re the one who told me it was okay to be with her in the first place!  And _nothing happened_ , Mama, everything was fine!”

“I may have said it wasn’t wrong to be with her, but I also said people would think it was strange!  And you know what happened last time you went out alone--there are people who think strange is _dangerous_ , Silas!”

“Well, they shouldn’t!” he shouts, his hands in fists, arms straight along his body.  “I’m _sick_ of that bullshit!”

“I’ve warned you about using those—“

“Psiiya does it!”

“I didn’t _raise_ Psiiya,” you retort, painfully aware of the double standard.

“Well _maybe_ I wish you h—“

He stops abruptly.  The air in the room seems to go cold and still, as though all the energy and anger that was building ran into a wall.  He blinks rapidly and in the dim light of the table lamp you can see translucent red glistening under his lashes.  His chin trembles.  His hands relax.

“Silas,” you say softly.  He looks away from you, sniffling.

“I didn’t mean what I was going to say.”  He wipes one eye with the heel of one hand.  “I’m just mad at, at everyone, and I felt bad about lying to you, and now Dessie’s in trouble too, and it wouldn’t be a problem if I weren’t—if people didn’t—”

You put your hands on his shoulders, pull him close, hug him while he cries.  The pink stains in your blouse will wash out.

“So,” you say gently, rocking him back and forth, “how was the first date?”

\--

The next day, you have another talk with Silas.  Then both of you have a talk with Dessie’s parents. 

And a couple of days later, you have a talk with Psiiya.  You know he tries not to swear in the house, but often it seems like he can’t help it.  And Silas, with his knack for new words, is already picking up some of Psiiya’s favorites.

He’s sitting at the table with a mug of hot cocoa when you try, haltingly, to broach the subject.  You wouldn’t have mentioned it now but when he tells you that hot cocoa is “The fuckin’ awesometht shit ever,” you think it might be the opportunity you were looking for.

“Did you learn those words…that is, in the place where you hatched…”

“They didn’t teach uth to talk at CrockerCorps,” says Psiiya.  “At least, not all of it.  All the troll words I know from the older trolls there and the human stuff…”  He smiles thinly.  “Motht of that’th been shouted at me while I was on the run.”

“You belonged to CrockerCorps?”  You realize a split second after asking that “belonged” probably isn’t a word he cares for, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“Yeah, me and a bunch of others.  There’s not a lot of trolls in the country right now but they’re working on getting more, I think.”  He makes a face.  “They were super-excited about me.  I was _thpecial_.”  He gives off a few deliberate flashes of strobing red and blue, and you get the picture.

He keeps talking, more than he’s ever told you before, halting at first and then picking up speed.  He starts with what he remembers of the Crocker hatchery, the experimental care program there, how many grubs never made it because the temperature was wrong, and then it’s “schoolfeeding” and the words trolls made up on their own and never used around the caretakers because they weren’t “real English”. 

And there’s more after that, more than you really wanted to know.  He doesn’t seem able to stop, either, as though the words are being dragged out of him in an undammed stream.  After five minutes he’s talking so fast that you can barely understand him.

_“--andthothe eggthneverhatched ‘cuth that’thwhathappenth whenyou try an’hatchdifferentbloodcolorth together and theykept thplitting up pitchpairs—“_

“Psiiya!”

His hair is standing on end, one hand convulsively pounding the table every time his voice rises.  He stares at you with those blank, bi-colored eyes and rattles on, _“—broughtgrownuptrollth in alonelefttheir quadrantmatesinthewild and they jutht, died, thome ofthem—“_

__

You’re starting to panic and you’re not sure trying to calm him down won’t just make things worse.  So you do the only thing you can think of. 

“Silas!  Can you come in here, please?”

It usually takes a couple tries to bring him out of his room when he’s writing, but something about the urgency in your voice must reach him because in another moment he peeks into the dining room, looking concerned.

“Mama, what’s—”

“He’s…having some kind of fit, I think,” you say helplessly.  “Can you please try to help him?”

Silas nods and steps carefully forward, waving one hand slowly to catch Psiiya’s attention.  Psiiya’s head snaps back and forth between you and Silas and now his slurred speech is interspersed with great, spasmodic coughs of laughter. 

When Silas puts an arm over his shoulder, he stiffens but doesn’t stop.  Silas rubs circles on his back, making the same slow _ssshhhhh_ noises you used to calm him with when he was small.  Eventually, Psiiya’s frantic babbling turns into quick, shaky breaths and finally eases into a steady rhythm of inhales and exhales.

“There,” says Silas, giving one shoulder a final, perfunctory pat.  “Are you okay now?”

“Sorry,” says Psiiya hoarsely.  Your heart almost breaks.

“There is nothing wrong with having a bad day,” says Silas—a direct quote of something you used to say embarrassingly often before Silas pointed it out.  “Even my cats used to get scared and unhappy sometimes, and they needed to be calmed down just like that.  I think we all—“

“Cats?” says Psiiya, his voice oddly sharp.  “You do the same for _mewbeasts_?”

Silas’s forehead wrinkles.  “…Well, yes, I’m pretty good at things like that.  Mama says I have a way with—“

“With _everyone_ ,” Psiiya finishes for him, and suddenly you have a very bad feeling about where this conversation is going.  “You mean you just…calm down whoever needs it?”

Silas looks even more confused now.  “Well, you can’t just…let someone hurt themselves like that, can you?  If Dessie’s getting worked up over something—“

 “Oh, wow,” says Psiiya sarcastically, “romance beyond quadrantth, huh?  Just like in the old thtories.  How _romantic_.”

“Quadrants?”  You still haven’t told Silas about troll romance, and apparently Psiiya still hasn’t either.  He sounds testy, but you can’t step in.  You can’t try to settle all of Silas’s conflicts for him.

“You really don’t know what I’m talking about,” says Psiiya sharply.  “You’ve never hated someone so much you couldn’t thtop thinking about them, or felt drawn to keep two people from fighting, or…or… Well, shit, of course you wouldn’t, you’ve never been around other trolls…”

“What does that have to do with anything?  What are you talking about?”

“No, you know, I’m not talking to you about this, if you’re so set on being a human, or trying _not_ to be a troll, or whatever’s wrong with you-- _don’t touch me_!”

Silas, staring in concern at Psiiya, just put a hand on his shoulder.  Psiiya stares back, his mismatched eyes narrowed in pain crossed with some other unreadable emotion.

Silas tightens his grip comfortingly and says, “Hey, calm down...  Are you alright?  Just talk to me, what’s wrong?”

A long moment of silence.  You remember what Psiiya called it when Silas calmed down that Makara boy— _pale_ —and the way he described it… 

Your heart lurches at the uncertainty and longing on Psiiya’s face when he looks at your son’s hand on his shoulder.  And then he smiles a crooked, awful smile and says, “Never mind.  You’d pacify anything with a pulse.”

He grabs Silas’s collar and pulls the diamond pendant from under the shirt.  All it takes is a quick, angry jerk and the fine chain snaps.  Silas opens his mouth to protest but Psiiya has already shrugged off his hand and stalked off, double fangs bared, his body tight with unhappiness. 

\--  
Things are cold between the Maryam household’s trolls for a while.  Even when Psiiya starts talking to Silas again, he seems stiff and unsure of himself.  You wish there were something you could do to help, but again you get the sense that this is something beyond you.  Anyway, you feel Psiiya would resent your interference.

Still, there are some issues where you just have to put your foot down.

“It’s just to the library, I swear.  I won’t lie to you again.  Just please, Mama, give us this.”

“Not on your own.”

“Mama, her parents have already said yes!”

“And it would be alright if I called them about it?” you ask pointedly, and the look on his face says everything.  He’s telling the truth.  Silas isn’t capable of faking an expression like that, and seeing it you can’t force back the guilt rising inside you.

“I’d understand if you didn’t trust me anymore,” he says, and you sigh because coming from one of your siblings, decades ago, that would have been a ploy for sympathy.  He means it.  He always means it.

“…You just made me nervous, dear.  Walking all the way up to another part of town without telling me, of course I’d be worried.”

“Right,” he says quietly.

“So if you do go to the library, you ought to stay there the whole time,” you add, and watch his face light up like a sunrise.  It feels good, giving second chances.  But you meant it when you said you were worried, so of course there are addendums.  He’s to call you from the library’s desk phone as soon as they get there—it shouldn’t take them more than fifteen minutes—and also whenever they’re about to leave.

He seems to pay close attention, but the instant he has your permission to leave he’s out the door like a shot, and you’re left in a state of mixed fondness and exasperation.  Just fifteen minutes, you think, fifteen minutes and you’ll be able to relax.

Half an hour later, he still hasn’t called and you’ve realized, too late, that you don’t have the library’s number.  You never needed it before now—why did you never buy the area phonebook?    

You consider for a brief, panicky moment that he’s gotten into trouble again but then you remember who he’s walking with.  This is both reassuring—you know he’s safer with Dessie than he would be alone—and unfortunate—the only remaining conclusion is that they’ve gone off somewhere else together.  Again.

You’ve never been more disappointed in your son, and you’re not waiting for him to come home this time.  This has to stop, even if you have to spend all day searching the town for him.

Before you’ve even got your shoes on, though, there’s a knock on the door.  You hurry to answer it, sure that Silas has come back for some reason, but when you open the door…

“Hello,” says a young man in red and white checkers.  “We’re here to talk to you about a runaway yellowblood troll!  We’ve hard reports of sightings in this area!  Do you have a moment?” 

His partner, a dark-haired woman in the same cheerful outfit, nods enthusiastically.  They’re both very…clean, you suppose is the word.  Almost unnervingly so, their hair too neat, their faces too pink-cheeked and happy.  It only takes a moment to bring to mind Psiiya’s strange fit when he started telling you about Crockercorps and make a snap decision to lie to their faces.

“I’m sorry, you probably heard from the neighbors there’s a troll living in this house, but he’s a red-blood,” you say, as polite and disinterested as possible.  “Off-spectrum, actually.”

“Would you mind letting us inside?” asks the woman.  You force yourself to stay relaxed.

“Actually, I was on my way out.  There’s something important I need to do.  If you have any other questions, please ask me now.”

This is the wrong thing to say.  For some reason they take this as permission to inquire after all your personal information—name, age, original address, level of education, why on earth would they need to know that? 

You feel like they’re going to ask questions forever, and all the while your anger and frustration are close to boiling over because your son disobeyed you _again_ and he’s gone and you have to _bring him home_.  You shift impatiently back and forth in your sock feet, trying valiantly to resist the impulse to slam the door in their faces.

Eventually, though, they seem to grow tired of peering not-so-covertly over your shoulder and take their leave, still smiling.  You wave them off brusquely, manage to not quite slam the door, and hurry to put on your shoes.  You’re fuming.

Exacerbating the situation—and your mood—your boots are missing.  You spend five increasingly frustrating minutes searching for them around the house, eventually giving up and putting on two layers of socks under your favorite flats.  You’ll still be cold but it’ll have to do.

And you’re just about to grab your coat and head out the door when the phone rings.  You wouldn’t have answered it if there hadn’t been the slightest chance it was your son calling, but there is so you do.

“Rosa Maryam speaking, who is—”

 _“Rosa!”_   It’s Mrs. Belfast from the library.  At first you’re relieved— _this_ is it, _this_ is the call you were waiting for--but there’s a note of panic in her voice that makes you think maybe it’s something else.

A knot of anxiety tightens in your stomach.  “Is something wrong?  Is Silas there?”

_“Oh, thank God, Rosa—I tried calling the police but the man said it wasn’t their—Rosa, they got here but this boy started talking to them outside, that Makara boy, and—“_

She tells you what’s happening.

You drop the phone without hanging up and run, stopping only to take Psiiya aside when you pass him in the kitchen and tell him to stay inside the house, everything’s fine, you just need to go out.  You know he can hear your voice shaking but you’re gone before he can protest.

\-- _they’d moved down the street, and at first there were people just watching, but the more the Makara boy yelled and pointed, the more people came forward and surrounded them_ —

Your lungs are burning.  You run.

_\--look at them holding hands, he’d shouted, look at her walking around with some horned freak animal, it’s not right—_

The air is cold as ice and stings your face and you run, frantic, looking everywhere for some sign of SIlas.

_\--and your son was trying to talk to them about it but Makara just yelled louder, and when Dessie got fed up she tried to hit him—_

_Oh God…_

_\--so Silas held her back and Makara was still shouting, how dare you grab her like that, how dare you treat her that way, and they took her away somewhere and the people watching—_

You stagger to a halt, staring, your breath tearing your throat.

The street is empty save for a few parked cars and a cluster of young men, and Carlos Makara, standing on the hood of a truck, a tow chain in both hands, pulled tight—something must be hanging from it but you can’t see through the people gathered around him, shouting. 

One draws back his foot for a kick, and another is leaning over to bring down a length of wood—

You start running again, shouting, and as they turn you see familiar faces, mostly young men, a few older than you.  You see recognition in their eyes and there’s an instant change in their attitude. Bodies shift together to block your path, and one of them drives his shoulder into you as you push at them, just hard enough to knock you back.  _“It’s Old Maid Maryam!_ ” says a voice whose owner you can’t see.  You’re panting, weak from the run, mouthing incoherent pleas— _let me—please I need to—I have to—_

You see glaring eyes, accusatory, impatient  “You should’ve seen him pulling at little Dessie Palo!”says a red-headed boy you’ve seen around town—you remember thinking he had a nice smile—and an elbow connects with your face as you break past him. _“God only knows what he’ll do if you just let him out on his own!”_ A heavy boot lands on your left foot, a pair of rough hands grip your arm.  _“Just stay back, Maryam.”  “Yeah!  You gotta teach the dog new tricks before he’s too old to learn them!  Isn’t that_ right _?”_

There’s a thud, a gasp, and a broken, plaintive groan that pierces your heart, and you are possessed by a rage so brutal it takes your breath away for a moment.  You scream and twist violently—your arm feels like it’s going to tear off but the man holding you lets go and you surge forward, blind with fury. 

Your fist connects with the back of a boy’s head and he staggers forward, giving you enough room to keep pressing.  Through the bodies in front of you see a flash of red before someone pushes you hard from behind.  You fall awkwardly on your left leg and something in your hip seems to _pop_.  Your elbows skid along asphalt.

The pain sets in slowly, unbearably acute, and you don’t even have the breath to scream because you’re looking right at Silas, lying a foot away from you.

His shirt is gone but you see the tatters hanging around his waist—it was beaten off of him.  You just ironed it this morning, it was white and clean and perfectly creased but the shreds are bright red now and his skin—

It’s all so red, oh God, oh God, and the chain cinched tight around his wrists, cutting into him, oh God, so much red, how could this happen to your baby, how could they do this to him—

Carlos jerks the chain and Silas’s limp body stiffens as he’s raised halfway off the ground by his bound hands, and you hear him crying like he hasn’t for years, crying like a small child, abject, hoarse sobs, and you’re going to kill them for this—you’re going to—

 _“Mama,”_ he says, and you think for a moment he’s seen you, but his eyes are still squeezed shut.  His body shakes.  You can barely see the red tears for all the scarlet on his face. 

“Don’t worry, Si, looks like she finally came for you,” says Carlos softly, and then looks you straight in the eye and yells, _“HE’S BEEN WANTING YOU FOR A WHILE NOW, MISS MARYAM!”_ Then, quiet again, almost crooning, _“Suffering, Miss Maryam.”_

__

_Oh God_ , there’s blood on his torn knuckles, blood up and down the links of the chain in his hands and can’t help imagining the damage it could do if it were swung like a whip--

“Wants his mommy, _THAT’S A GOOD ONE_!”

You wail, haul yourself up and lunge, and your leg collapses beneath you but you manage to catch the chain with one hand and it falls with you, torn from Carlos’s fingers.  He shouts in pain and all you can think is that it’s not enough, you have to hurt him more, you are going to _kill_ him—

But the rest of them are drawing closer and your son is bleeding on the ground and there’s no _time_ , he needs help.  Your leg shakes as you unravel the chain around his wrists and lift him in both arms, he’s gotten so big, too big, too heavy now to carry--

The boy with the wooden club slams it into your head with an almighty _CRACK_.  Someone pulls at Silas’s arm as you fall back against the hood of the car in pain and kick out blindly.  There’s a groan, _good_ , and then another one and when you open your eyes, stars dancing in your vision, you see--

Wherever they took Dessie, she didn’t stay there long, and Carlos may be two feet taller than her but she makes up for it in sheer ferocity.  After the first punch he’s bent double, and her knee collides with his face and you, your child in your arms, run away, hating yourself, screaming at yourself, _you can’t leave her there—but there was no time—she’s only a child—Silas needs_ help—

You black out twice trying to carry him.  Running is agony and there are shouts behind you and you’re not going to make it home, With every jolt, Silas whimpers and you don’t have the breath to whisper reassurances.  Your muscles are on fire but you have to run.

If they catch you, they’ll have to kill you.  You won’t let them take him.

“Rosa!”

You don’t recognize the voice at first—Mr. Zahhak has only ever called you “Maryam” before.  But to your left through hazy eyes you see an immense, blurry white shape.  It coalesces into Horuss Zahhak, standing in his driveway, wiping oil from his hands.

“What on earth is happening?”

“Carlos Makara…Thomas Snyder, Michael Gr—I didn’t see—oh God there were so many, they beat him, I need to get home, I need—“

“Come inside,” he says.  You stare, nonplussed, and he gestures urgently towards his house.  The sounds of pursuit grow louder.

You nod and he puts an awkward arm around you, helps you limp through the door.  You collapse onto the couch, still fading in and out of consciousness as you try to explain further, and all the while Mr. Zahhak examines Silas, checking his pulse, testing his ribs— _“broken…broken…broken…”_   Outside there’s the clamor of Carlos’s gang as they pass by in the street and your heart pounds in your throat. 

Eventually, though, there is silence and the sound of your labored breathing.  “These wounds are very bad,” says Mr. Zahhak eventually, and puts a large, square hand on your shoulder.  “I’ll take care of it, Maryam.”

He hoists Silas bodily over his shoulder, and you think he must have blacked out because he’s limp as a doll again.  You try to protest—you want to be there with him—but the words are jumbled and talking makes your head hurt.  He leaves you alone on the couch, in your scarlet-stained coat.

You hurt all over, your right leg won’t move, but you can relax now, you can stop…  You blink awake without realizing you’d gone under again and try to breathe easy--Mr. Zahhak said he would take care of Silas, he’s going to be okay, he’s going to…

From the adjacent room there’s a soft click…and a creak, long and high-pitched and familiar, and suddenly your heart explodes into panicky palpitations.  _Oh no, oh no, oh no no no no, no—_

You heave yourself to your feet and scream, your hips hurts, it hurts so much, but you have to run and you do, until you reach the end of the hallway and fall, your leg crumpling beneath you.  But you can see from here, propping yourself up on your elbows.

Mr. Zahhak has the gun under one arm and Silas over his other shoulder; he’s turning towards the back door.

He’s going to kill your son.

“ _No!_ ”

He turns around—that’s good, that’s really good, he needs to stay here, he needs to put down the gun.

“Rosa,” he says, pitying, rueful, “I didn’t want you to see—“

“Don’t take him,” you beg, “don’t take him,” you plead, “put down the gun, please just, take him to a doctor—“

“He doesn’t need a doctor,” says Mr. Zahhak slowly.  “He’s in pain.  Your pet needs to be put out of his—”

You scream again, wordless, furious, anguished, struggling to get to your feet.  “ _Don’t you dare!  He’s not an animal!”_ He’s your child, a _person_ , how _dare_ they—

“You’re not well, Rosa.  I know it seems cruel now, but when my father had a horse with a broken limb…”

He trails off and you open your mouth to yell again, but then you notice Silas stirring.  Mr. Zahhak stares, tries to shift Silas’s weight on his shoulder, but there’s a sudden flurry of violent movement as Silas struggles, shouts, elbows Mr. Zahhak in the head.  He drops to the floor, bloody and red-eyed and growling, and Mr. Zahhak draws the rifle up under one arm.

“Silas, honey,” you whisper hoarsely.  “Come here, we’re…we’re going to get help.”

Mr. Zahhak snaps, “Rosa, stop talking to him like that, you’ll only make it worse!” and Silas makes another wordless, inhuman sound of rage.  You shudder at the sound, all the rage and pain in it, the way it cracks into a whimper at the end—he’s barely on his feet, swaying where he stands.  Instantly, the barrel of Mr. Zahhak’s rifle is trained on him.

“ _NO!_ ”  Your insides are burning ice, your eyes are wet, you want to kill him, he _can’t, you won’t let him_ , you’d rather die first—

But Silas is already speaking, the rifle a foot from his chest, body tensed with fury.  His voice is quiet and tight, shaking.  “You…you want to…shoot me like a dying animal,” he says, his voice growing stronger with every word.  “You wouldn’t even let me die like a person.  You were going to take me out behind the house and blow my brains out there, _poor creature, there was nothing we could do_ , better get another troll, just as well, you let him think he was human, he was dangerous, _just as well_ , they’re so much cuter when they’re _small_!” 

He’s yelling now, and the pain in his voice shakes you to your bones because his patient tolerance is gone now.  You’ve never seen him like this, never this bad, and you can barely seen your son beyond what they made of him.  Mr. Zahhak is white-faced, hand slack on the trigger of his gun.  Both of you stare, hypnotized, at Silas.

“Everyone keeps telling Mama, _he’s not human, he’s not human,_ you included, like that’s a reason why I _can’t be her son_!  You _bastard_ , I never fucking _wanted_ to be human, even when I was young, even when they told her _no pets allowed_ , even when I was scared and wanted my mother and _they kept hitting me_ —“ 

“You hate us,” croaks Mr. Zahhak, and you can tell he’s afraid.

Silas snarls again, the gun barrel twitches, and you think you’re going to throw up—“Only narrow-minded _bigots_ generalize how they feel about a whole fucking _species_.  Like you, you pathetic, horrible old man, you’re _just_ as bad as the fuckers who did this to me!  You all say it’s pointless to teach a troll to talk but in the end you’re just _afraid of us having voices_.  I’m not a human but Mama treats me like a _person_ , and so does Dessie, and that’s all I _ever_ wanted but you—?  _FUCK YOU,_ I’mright in front of you so you _tell_ me, tell me I’m a dumb animal, _LOOK ME IN THE EYES AND FUCKING SAY IT TO MY GOD DAMN FACE!_ ”

“Silas!”

He stops, breathing hard, lip bleeding anew, the rifle bumping against his chest, and he and Mr. Zahhak both turn slowly to you. 

“Young man,” you say, “what have I told you about that kind of language?”

“ _He’s not your son, Maryam!”_ shouts Mr. Zahhak, and Silas makes an anguished, furious noise in the back of his throat, tears making fresh tracks in drying blood—

“You take it back _you take it the FUCK back_ —”

“He’s my son,” you say, as loudly as you can, and he stops, panting, half-sobbing.  “He’s my good son and he’ll do as I say.  He’s always been better than the people who say things to hurt him.  He knows…better than to scratch itches…  _Right_ , Silas?”

It’s the voice you always used to let him know he was in serious trouble.  He slowly steps back, breathing heavily through his nose, blinking fast.  You try desperately to think of what to do next, but your head is spinning and Mr. Zahhak still hasn’t lowered his gun…

There’s a sound of footsteps and yelling and a blur of green skirts, and suddenly Dessie’s there, arms spread wide.  You feel fear and relief at once, because it’s not your child in front of the gun anymore, but it’s someone else’s child, a sweet girl who just wanted to go on a date today and ended up in all of this.

You can see Mr. Zahhak shaking from here.  He looks afraid now and you’re so glad when he takes his trembling finger off of the trigger that your eyes well up.  A scared man with a gun…

You blink your eyes clear and see Dessie’s face for the first time and suddenly you know why Mr. Zahhak is scared.  She doesn’t make speeches like Silas, or plead as you did.  Her teeth are bared, her bruised face wrinkled, her eyes green slits, and you remember when she attacked the boy outside the shop.  She looks inches from going for the throat, boiling with rage but utterly silent save for heavy, ragged breathing.

“Miss Palo,” says Mr. Zahhak in a choked voice.  “Please…”

“Dessie,” says Silas.  He sounds numb, scared now that it’s someone else’s life in danger.  “You have to move, what if he—“

“I wouldn’t shoot her,” growls Mr. Zahhak, and Dessie goes red, incandescent with fury.  When she speaks, every word sounds like an effort.

“But you _would_ shoot…my _boyfriend_?”

“Miss…”  He swallows hard and you remember suddenly how fond he is of Dessie, how he becomes almost fatherly around her.

He begins to lower the gun and you exhale slowly, closing your eyes for just a moment, relief making you go limp.

Someone shouts from outside the open door and now you remember something else.

You remember who you last saw Dessie with.

 _“Zahhak, you motherfucker,_ kill _it!_ ”

You look up, bewildered, in time to see a dark figure at the door and across from it, and Silas stepping past Dessie to stand in front of her instead, snarling again like a wild animal.  Mr. Zahhak notices that too, and there is fear in his face.

 _“SHOOT!”_ bellows Carlos Makara, earsplitting and commanding, and--

There’s a sound like a door being slammed shut, but ten times louder.  Your head rings and aches and you look wildly around for whoever made the noise, noticing only in passing that Mr. Zahhak is lowering his gun.

You hadn’t realized he’d raised his gun.

Maybe it would have been better somehow if you’d understood right away, if you hadn’t noticed first Mr. Zahhak’s pale, horrified face or seen Dessie run, screaming, at Carlos, who ducks back out the door as she comes.  Maybe if you hadn’t had a private eternity to spot the white smoke clouding around the gun or focus on the fresh blood spilling down your son’s chest, you wouldn’t have had to experience that slow, awful, wrenching feeling in your gut.

When Silas falls, so does the gun.  It clatters to the floor and Zahhak staggers backwards, breathing hard, not looking at you.  You barely register his presence.  You have to get to your son.

You crawl forward and your leg is a shaft of hot, unending pain but soon you’re next to him where he lies, clutching his chest and there is bright red all over his hands, seeping through his fingers.

“Keep pressure,” he mumbles, “case’f ‘mergencies.  Dun remove.  Bullet.”

Zahhak is talking.  “Rosa, I’m going to—I have to—I’ll bring a doctor—I have to make sure Dessie is—“

You don’t answer.  You don’t hear him leave.  You sit up in agony, and your back aches but you bend over to pull him onto your lap, bruised and bloody.  The movement makes him yelp in pain and there’s more blood between his fingers and your breath is coming faster now, you can’t control it.

“I’ve got you,” you manage, remembering how you would hold him back before he said he was too old to be held, when he’d stub his toe or scuff his knee.  “Silas, baby, I’m here, I’ve got you…  It’s going to be—”

“He shot…so much red.  Hurts.  Hurts all over.  Mama, worst…worst day of my…life…”

_Kiss it better, Mama!_

“We’ll fix it,” you say, breathless, your throat tight.  “There’s…there’s nothing wrong with having a bad day, honey.  You’re going to be okay.  Everything’s going to be _fine_.”

He breathes and it’s a deep, horrible rattle, it’s like the colds he’d get when you could rub his back and put Vicks on his chest and know he’d be a little better in the morning.  You stroke his hair and blink back tears and wish you could fix this.  You would do anything, _anything_ …

“Mama…  I don’t, I don’t want to die.  We were going to go to the library tomorrow—Mama, I’m sorry, there’s this late fee I haven’t paid yet and it’s almost ten dollars—“

“You’re not going to _die_.”  Your voice breaks at last, under the weight of the lie.  “You’re just going to rest tomorrow but I’ll pay the fee for you.  There are so many books you haven’t read…”

He coughs and nods and you think how Goodnight Moon always kept him awake instead of making him sleepy the way it was supposed to and you’re desperate, delirious, if only you had it here, if only you could read it to him now, you could keep him awake until help arrived.

“Woods,” says Silas, and his voice is suddenly small and plaintive like a small child’s.  You stare, blank, not understanding, and he tries again—“ _The woods…are lovely…_ ”

You try to breathe deeply but your chest aches as though there’s a bullet lodged there, you can’t form sentences without stuttering as your lungs suck in quick, convulsive gulps of air.  _“The w-woods are lovely…dark a-a-and deep…but I have p…promises…”_

 _“Promises to keep_ ,” he murmurs, and looks you directly in the eyes, smiling softly.  “I love you, Mama.”

“Silas—“

_“And miles to go…before…”_

“Ssshhh,” you whisper, running your fingers through his bloody hair, and for a moment in your mind’s eye you see a little face, a gray finger pressed to his lips— _A little old lady whispering--Hssshhh!_

 _“Miles to go…before I sleep_ ,” he says slowly.  And you see for one beautifully, painfully brilliant moment a future where he returns his book and pays the fine, where he reads every book to be read, and goes on a hundred more dates with Dessie Palo, and changes the world, and you’re going to be so _proud_ \--

“I love you too, Silas,” you say, and the pain in your leg is nothing compared to this.  “Y-you know I do, honey, I love you to p-p-pieces.  I’ve got you…”

As you begin to cry, blood trickles from the corners of his mouth.  His breathing gurgles a little, becomes more shallow.  With painful slowness, he rolls over into your lap, arms hanging loosely around your waist, and you hug him back—gently at first, afraid to hurt him, and then, as he falls limp in your embrace, tighter and tighter, rocking back and forth.

The sound you make is not a whimper or a sob.  It comes from somewhere deep in your chest, a tight, horrible groan that slowly changes into a wail that just keeps going until you crush all the air from your lungs, and then continues just the same after a quick, desperate inhale.  Your whole face feels wet with tears but you don’t bother to wipe it.  There are no pauses, no moments when you relax into silent grief.

After what might have been an hour, the tears are gone but the wail continues as hoarse, broken keening.  In your arms, Silas goes cold while you remember all the little things, moments you’ll never have again— _a little bundle of heat and life._

The pain is unceasing.

Your son is dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There were scenes in this chapter I was physically unable to write for a long time. I hate it. I really, really hate that the first five chapters led up to this.  
> One more chapter.  
> Rosa Maryam: Rise up.


	7. Fly Away Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mr. Zahhak mourns. There is a funeral. Rosa Maryam is alone again but doesn't intend to stay that way. In the 21st century, her son's cause is no longer ahead of his time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Seven owes its name to "Ladybird, ladybird" by Mother Goose. (This one is actually appropriate; I recommend reading it.)  
> Belatedly and guiltily added credits to chapters four and five for Mr. Zahhak and Psiiya, whom I'm borrowing for the purposes of this story from coldhope and saccharineSylph. On a similar note, though BIS is built around their stories and does its best to blend with the universe/continuity, it should be considered purely a speculative secondary fanfiction and has no actual bearing or legitimate connection to the "canon".

Mr. Zahhak pays for the hospital bill.  You don’t look at him; you think if you do you’ll try to kill him.  There are no laws to punish his crime, not to the extent that they ought to.  Shooting someone else’s pet isn’t the same as killing a son in front of his mother.  He pays for burial arrangements too, in a small, private plot in the corner of a local church yard.  Apparently, for enough money you can get anything you want.

Almost anything.

Doctors look at your leg, test your reflexes, try to ask questions.  People move around you, trying to get you to eat, to speak, to meet their eyes.  The outside world is distant and moves in great waves of meaningless time, while you inhabit a separate, slow eternity of agony.

You are full of memories.  You don’t want to forget him but you wish they would stop.  You wish every moment weren’t filled with thoughts of sitting on the porch with him in the cold early morning, wrapped in a blanket, listening to bird song; you wish every regret weren’t like a knife in your heart. 

It’s unbearable recalling every fight you ever had, every opportunity to play with him you spent reading one of your ridiculous romance novels, every moment where you might have said something different, kept him from leaving.  _If only I’d been a better mother, if only he’d done as I said_ …

You don’t know how long you spend in the hospital, but when they finally discharge you the snow has turned to slush and the air smells of damp earth.  There’s a man in an expensive black car waiting for you, and you don’t ask why he’s here or who’s paying him for his services.

The chauffeur hired by your son’s killer tips his hat as you get in and takes you home in silence.

You stand on the sidewalk for a long while even after the car is gone.  You feel you’re looking up at the house of a stranger, dark and empty and forbidding.  As you draw closer, you notice the front door is ajar, and suddenly remember Psiiya.  How long has he been home alone?  But no, he knows how to find food for himself, he should have been…

There are clawmarks on the doorframe.  Inside, almost every piece of furniture is on its side, and there’s a great black star of burned paint on the wall in the dining room, bubbles rising like blisters in the center.  It’s like the marks Psiiya left on the wall by the door, but much more intense.

 _He was fighting_ , you think numbly.  _He fought them and they dragged him out the door anyway.  They took him back._

_I need to tell Silas, he never knew—_

You catch the thought before it can go any further and swallow hard as your throat tightens.  Eyes burning, wondering helplessly how you could even begin to convince CrockerCorps release Psiiya, you stagger down the hallway to your bedroom.  Across the hall, the door to Silas’s room is open and just the slightest glance hits you like a sledgehammer because it looks just the same as it ever did but there is nothing where he should be.

You lie down on your bed and stare at the ceiling for what feels like several long, gray hours.  It could almost be the day before Patricia gave you the grub, and you make a game of pretending you’ve gone back in time, that all of it is about to restart so that you can do it over.  Better.

It doesn’t last long.  Maybe the regrets are the worst part, or maybe it’s the absences where he ought to be, or maybe it’s just the emptiness of the house now that everything you had that was good is gone.  There’s no crackle of psionics from the living room, no laughter--that mixture of Silas’s husky chuckles and Psiiya’s infectious, unabashed snickering.  You were going to teach Psiiya how to cook, it was all going to work out...  You’ll never have the chance to ask him what all those strange troll words mean.

And that’s the thought that makes you cry again, perhaps because now you have no reason to ask.  By the time the tears abate, the sun is setting outside.  Slowly, each small movement an effort, you haul yourself into a sitting position and force yourself to go into his room. 

It’s a mess.  There are clothes piled on the floor into one corner, with a hastily-scribbled note on top of them— _I’ll get these later!  Promise!_

His notebook lies open on the desk, a couple of pens sitting on top of it.  There are careful scribbles in two different colors on the top of the page—he was testing them.  The black one was running out of ink.  In red, under the scribbles, is written _Silas Maryam._ His cursive is perfect as usual.

Part of you balks at the thought of flipping through the notebook—he never wanted you to and doing it now would be like acknowledging that he’s…

Gone.

A blot appears on the page you’re looking at, and then another.  In the wet spots on the paper, the ink from the other side of the page starts to bleed through, and for some reason that’s what lets you turn the page.

It’s a limerick, terribly generic, with a barely-rhyming punchline, and on the other side of the page what looks to be the end of a long, heartfelt poem.  You can’t make yourself read all of it but lines stand out— _red inside but not without_ — _asking with their eyes “can you wash off the gray”, and it dawns_ — _but we’re both red_ …

The next page is a sonnet for Dessie, the next a journal entry, confused and angry about Psiiya’s outburst.  You flip blindly through it, remembering that he started writing on his fourteenth birthday.  It’s over two years of entries.  This is his life in his words and you realize abruptly that it’s the most precious thing in the world.

One entry catches your eye.  It starts, _I worry about Mama sometimes…_

_“…she tells me sometimes that I saved her life, that before someone gave her this little red troll grub, she felt like she’d stopped caring about anything and there was a void inside her.  She says when she got me, looking after me kind of filled the void.  I don’t think that’s the only reason why she loves me, but sometimes I worry that when I leave the house, she’ll go back to not caring about anything._

_“It seems kind of irrational when I see it written down like that._

_“I am going to leave some day, though.  I’ll always come home and visit but there’s so much out there I’ve only read about and Dessie wants to come with me.  We’re going to talk to the people who don’t know much about trolls and I’ll try to teach them a little bit more about us.”_

You snort in exasperation—he’s much too _young_ to be thinking this far ahead…

_“I think Mama would be fine, though.  I didn’t really save her, I just gave her a reason to save herself.  That’s what I think.”_

You close the book abruptly, set it down on the desk, and wipe your eyes.  What time is it?  It has to be almost six.

You don’t want to eat.  You don’t want to do anything.  But there’s something bothering you, that one sentence that keeps ringing in your head.  _“…sometimes I worry that when I leave the house, she’ll go back to not caring…”_

You make dinner, an impromptu meal of cold leftovers.  You set the dinner table and one of the chairs back on their feet and dig into a tupperware of green beans.  It tastes better than anything you’ve ever had and you cry uncontrollably, taking bites between sobs.

After that, the house needs to be cleaned.  You know you don’t have to wash his clothes but you do, one more time.

\--

The grave is dug, the coffin supplied.  Men who work for the undertaker place the coffin in the hole, while you and Dessie watch in silence.  There are a few others there—people from around the town who knew Silas, _really_ knew him.  There’s no service, really.  Part of you wanted a priest to come, but you wouldn’t have been able to stand asking and being rejected.

So you say what you can.  You try to recite _Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening_ but the words die in your throat before you can reach the last stanza.  It’s not enough.  Words of remembrance are useless.  You don’t need to _remember_ , you don’t need to remind everyone what a sweet, honest, intelligent boy he was.  You need him _back_.

But Mrs. Belfast shares what she remembers of his visits to the library—he was a bright spot in her day, a credit to his mother, the most avid reader she’d ever met.  He changed her life, she says.  Being a librarian never seemed so important as it did when she was finding just the right book for him.  And you realize it’s not about knowing how important he was to you, but finding out how important he was to other people. 

You give Mrs. Belfast his library card, and she tries to insist on staying to help fill in the grave, but it’s a chilly day and her arthritis is getting worse.  In the end, you and Dessie take up the shovels and the two of you work in silence, mud spattering both your skirts.  Despite the cool air, sweat starts trickling down your back. 

Dessie cried at first but her face is dry now, hard and focused.  She’s stronger than you, you think.  Younger but so much stronger.  You could learn from her.

“I don’t know if anyone told you,” she says quietly, “but they arrested Carlos while you were in the hospital.  For the hits he landed on me, mostly.  Like it was anything compared to—Like I hadn’t taken worse, like I didn’t break his nose…  He tried to blame Silas for it but the rest of ‘em got nervous, didn’t want anyone looking into it too much, and they ratted on ‘im.”

You heft another shovel full of soil wordlessly.  You should feel some satisfaction, you think, but you don’t.  It’s not enough.  Eventually they’ll release him—probably even sooner than they normally might.  According to Dessie, the Makaras have deep pockets.

“We’re moving,” Dessie says.  “Sellin’ the shop, goin’ back to Tennessee.  Dad never wanted it anyway, he just kept it ‘cuz of Grandad.”

You look at her now, wiping sweat from your eyes, and feel suddenly empty all over again.  Of course Dessie is leaving too.

“I’m gonna miss you, Miss Maryam,” she says, a little less evenly now.  You walk around the dark mound of earth to hold her, both of you filthy and tired and sweating, and you hug her the way you used to hug Silas.  Like you’re never going to let go.

\--

It’s a week after the funeral.

You’re washing dishes, quiet and detached, when the anger takes you.  You weren’t expecting it—you’ve had waves of helpless frustration every day, but it’s as though a switch inside you was flipped on and now there are words stamped in fire across the sky of your personal horizon:

_MAKE THEM PAY._

You don’t understand what took you so long, whether you’ve just been in shock this whole time, but the little handgun you bought is still in the back of your sock drawer.  You slip it into your purse one night--hating yourself for not remembering to take it with you the day he died—and you leave the house with purpose in your strides.

You don’t knock on Mr. Zahhak’s door.  It’s unlocked and you enter with the handgun held tight in both hands, pointed at the floor.

“Maryam,” he says, and you jump, spinning around, raising the gun.  He’s settled in one corner of the dining room, an immense shadow that you should have noticed instantly but which somehow escaped your notice.

There’s a rifle leaning against the wall next to him.  Your mouth goes dry; your grip on the little handgun is slippery with sweat.  Did he expect this?  What if he shoots you too?

“Please,” he says.  His voice is so deep and so soft that you barely hear it.  Your ears are ringing.  He raises his arms and you shout something— _stop_ , maybe—but he doesn’t seem worried about the gun pointed at his chest.  “Maryam, please just…”

“Don’t move!  Why do you have _that_?” you ask hoarsely, jerking your head in the direction of the rifle.  “Were you waiting for me?”  _Did you expect crazy Old Maid Maryam to come here waving a gun, screaming about her dead pet—oh god—_

He looks at the rifle as though only just noticing it, and when he puts a hand around the stock you _almost_ pull the trigger.  But your eyes are adjusting to the darkness and you can see there’s a peculiar heavy slowness to his movements.  There’s no aggression as he slowly pulls the gun closer, leaning it against his chest so that the barrel is pointed up under his jaw.

The moment of understanding seems to knock the air from your lungs.  You stare, breathless, into his shadowy face and notice for the first time that he’s not wearing his glasses.

“Most days,” he says, “I just sit here…like this.  But you know…I’m a coward.  There is nothing else I want to do but I cannot…do…this one…thing.”  He punctuates every word by tapping his chin against the cold metal tube below it. 

You feel very sick all of a sudden.

“Please,” he says again, and you don’t have to ask what he wants.  Your hands shake.  Your finger hovers next to the trigger.

“Where does Carlos Makara live?” you ask instead, and he twitches, driving his jaw down against the gun barrel.

“His parents…sent him away a couple of weeks ago.  Boarding school.  Prominent…members of the community…complained.”

You actually almost laugh at that, hysterical, disbelieving giggles rising in your throat.  You swallow them and shake your head violently—Carlos Makara in a boarding school, as though it would do him any good…

“I’m…” Zahhak starts, and then shakes his head.  You think you know what he was about to say, and he was right to stop.  “Sorry” will never, ever be enough.

And yet, seeing him like this, you can’t fire.  You can’t.  There were nights, long ago, when you thought idly of how life seemed to be too much trouble, but you never spent days on end with a gun under your chin.  You never sank this far.

You swallow hard and let the handgun drop.  Even through the darkness you can see his features twist in distress. 

“Can your money get the other troll back from CrockerCorps?”

He stares.  “Other…?”

“His name was Psiiya.  He lived with us,” you say shortly.  “He escaped, I think, and they took him back the day…  They took him back.”

Zahhak shakes his head slowly.  “Maryam, if I could…  But it’s amazing enough that he escaped in the first place and you have no idea, the way that corporation works…I would have to go straight to the top.”

“Then do it!” you shout, desperate.  “How bad can the CEO—”

“You have no idea,” he says softly.  “I’ve met her before, Maryam, just once…  You’re not getting anything back from her.  The troll was…her property in the first—”

_“He’s not property!”_

Zahhak flinches and you wish he would argue, even point the gun at you, give you some _reason_ …  But he just seems utterly lost and dejected.  You pity him.  You hate yourself for it.

You drop the handgun on the floor with a clatter that echoes through the silent room.  “I could have tried harder,” you say, barely believing the words are coming from your mouth.  “I wish…I had brought him to visit you before.  I wanted to protect him but I wish you could have talked to him.  It’s just…sometimes people need help.  To be better.”

He says nothing.  You leave him there and you know you can’t stay in this place anymore.  Your house used to be full of the memories of a ruined marriage, and you changed those slowly into something better.  You’re not sure you can do it again.

\--

Before Dessie moves out, she visits your house one more time.  It’s cloudy that day but warm, and you’ve opened all the windows to let the dry air in.  It was almost physically painful to clear everything out of Silas’s room, removed the evidence of his existence, but you’re glad you did.  It won’t be the same this time; there won’t be piles of boxes sitting in the basement, cold reminders of something lost.

You offer her the little red notebook but she says she’s already read it hundreds of times over.  You feel a pang of jealousy at that, but tell yourself he would have let you read it at some point…when he was older.

She doesn’t take much in the end, just one piece of paper with a poem addressed to her and, oddly enough, a pair of pants.  He never wore them more than once, in the store, when he was so young that he could pull them almost up to his armpits and they still went down past his feet.

But he’d been fond of them so you bought them, intending to bring them in a little and wait for him to grow older.  Dessie says she’ll make shorts out of them—“For when I’m running around on the farm.”

When you ask her why, she looks you straight in the eye and says, “You gotta keep this stuff for a reason.  It can’t just sit around.  That’s a bad way to remember people.”

After she leaves, you sit in the living room for the long time, looking at the notebook.

\--

It’s not so hard to knock on your mother’s door this time.  The summer sun is bright and the pain is only a dull ache today.  It’s never quite gone but some days are better than others and right now you’re filled with a sense of calm purpose. 

She looks older, so much older and you’re sure you do too.  Yesterday you found a gray hair and thinking about it you couldn’t believe you’re almost forty years old.  You did your hair, remembering when your son was small and “helped” you brush it.  The sadness washed over you and you let it go by. 

“Rosa!”  Mama stares, open-mouthed, almost comical enough to make you smile.  “What are you doing here?”

You hold out the diary to her.  “I’d like to come in, but I want you to read this.  All of it.  It was Silas’s before he died.”

“Rosa…  I’m sorry.”  And she seems to mean it, but she looks a little relieved too, somehow. The anger is immediate, horrific and intense.  You push it back down.

“He was beaten within an inch of his life and then shot in front of me,” you say, and your voice barely trembles.  “He was sixteen.  I want you to remember that when you read what he wrote.  May I come in?”

She goes pale and you can’t help finding a certain savage satisfaction in it.

You make tea while Mama reads—awkward and self-aware at first and then more absorbed.  Once or twice, you think you even see her smile.  You sip your tea and wait.

When she’s done, she sets the notebook carefully aside and doesn’t look at you.

“I like the poetry best,” you say.  “The pages near the end with the worse handwriting, those are from the other troll who stayed with us for a while…  I think he used to live in a cage with the Roman numeral two on the plaque, and he thought all Is were supposed to look that way.”

And it still hurts, you think—it’s remarkable how fresh it can feel even today.  There are some pains that just don’t fade.

There’s a kind of light in Mama’s eyes that you never saw before, all those years ago.  She looks at you like you’re a different person—not a stranger, but not someone she was expecting either.

“You were young when Papa died,” she says, a little unsteadily.  “I loved that man more every year I knew him.  I still do, Rosa.  It’s been so long but…”

You meet each other’s eyes and neither of you says a word, because you both know.

You realize suddenly how much you love your mother.  How much you’ve missed her.  As you start to cry, she hurries forward and bends down to hug you where you sit in the old armchair.  “I think your Papa would have liked him,” she murmurs, and rocks you back and forth like you’re a little girl and not a full-grown woman.  “Ssshhh, _bella_ , _cara_ , my Rosalina…  I know, it hurts…  I know…”

\--

You move out of your old house a week later, bringing with you only the essentials and selling…everything else.  The old baby things, the furniture, the house itself…  You have one big box of memories—the quartz diamond pendant, Silas’s journal, the radio Psiiya took apart and put back together, which now plays completely different stations—some from outside the area. 

You keep in touch with Dessie.  The first letter you write is polite and cheerful, glossing over the daily effort to work past the pain.  Her reply is blunt, angry, several paragraphs of anguish completely free of sugarcoating.  You realize, a little late, that she may be the one person you can talk honestly to.

So you send each other your rage and hurt and news from the other side, and you comfort each other.  She’s so young but she has such a talent for talking to people, and she says she wanted to write a book.  It was going to be a book Silas could read, a book about trolls because there weren’t any books like that…  Now she thinks she might write about him instead.

Dessie Palo is almost two decades younger than you, but she becomes your best friend.  She tells you to start a movement, teach the world a little more, the way Silas wanted to.  But it’s not in your nature to stand and shout at adults, so instead you’ll sit and whisper to their children. 

Dessie supports you throughout the process of becoming a teacher—it’s been a long time since you were in school but you were always a quick study and they say you’re well-suited to the job.  Dessie comforts you over the phone after your first day, when the feeling of looking after the little children was too powerfully familiar and you had to leave the classroom to cry.

She sends you a copy of the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  You read it aloud to your class (with barely a hitch in your voice), and when you’ve finished you look around at the children and say, “How many of you know what a troll is?”  The management is impressed by your initiative in introducing new topics of learning, but warns you not to forget the syllabus.

After a while, you buy your own house.  It’s small but there’s only one of you and you like having less to clean.  As the years pass, you get cards from your old students, now entering college, thanking you for everything, and you put them in a box next to another card—red crayon on pink library paper.

You still take it out and read it every Mother’s Day, just to see the “I LOVE YOU” written in crooked red letters inside, next to a clumsy drawing of one taller figure in a skirt holding the hand of a smaller figure.  Both have large, spiky scribbles of hair.  Above them are drawn a couple of wobbly smiley faces, one with Silas’s small, rounded horns.

You just feel sad and a little ridiculous the first time you say “I love you too” back to the card, but over the years it becomes something of a ritual, fond and casual.  Around you, things change and you try to keep up, but you don’t have any intention of forgetting him.

You accept the usefulness of the internet a little nervously at first—it eliminated the necessity of teaching the Dewey Decimal System to little children, for which you can’t help feeling resentment.  You were _good_ at teaching the Dewey Decimal System.  So although you have a computer in your house, you don’t start using it regularly until you discover that there are people posting about trolls online.

Trolls have become more popular recently in certain circles, and with the advent of the internet, people have begun to share photos, articles, videos.  Most of the videos are like any other instance of people filming their pets, and even the most innocuous of them make you angry sometimes. 

It’s not that most of the owners are particularly unkind, but you see young trolls for what they are—children—and it pains you to see them taught useless, often profane words and dismissed as subhuman.  It’s even more distressing when they’re adults, their eyes fully converted to the color of their blood, and the only English in their repertoire is broken and still childlike.

It’s not right.

It’s not right but the web connects people, spreads news like nothing in history.  You wonder what people could learn if the right information were available.  You think about making a “blog”.

You’re still just thinking about it a week later, wondering idly whether your age would make you a less credible source in the eyes of young readers.  It’s late, much later than you should rightfully be awake.  The doctors have been telling you to get plenty of sleep, but you’ve found a new romance series and you’re almost done with the third book.

This morning you woke up and went to wash your face and when you looked up at the mirror you saw a woman with olive skin, wrinkles criss-crossing her face, and an arched nose that made her more regal than beautiful.  Her hair was closer to white than dark brown and her jade green eyes were still clear and bright.

You styled your hair and, because you’re old and you can, you put on green lipstick.  You’ve always liked the color green.  You feel like almost a whole person.

It’s almost midnight when your phone rings.  You don’t need to check the caller ID to know that it’s Dessie—only she would call you at eleven o’clock at night.

She doesn’t even wait for you to say hello—there’s just a rush of static and the urgent command, _“Turn on your TV!”_

You do, although it takes you a couple of minutes to find your remote in the cracks between your sofa cushions.  On the news channel, the announcers are talking energetically about—what is it, a trial?  Ethical dilemmas of ownership of…something.  You struggle to keep up until it cuts to blurry footage of a black-haired boy outside of a courthouse ( _young man_ , you correct yourself, everyone just looks like a baby these days).  He’s holding—

You see gray skin, shaggy dark hair, and orange horns and you have a split second to think how beautiful the little troll girl is before the camera is jostled and—

When they tear his charge away from him, the expression on the young man’s face is so intimately familiar to you that it actually takes your breath away.  There was such a tenderness in the way he held her, such desperation in the way he clung to her, and his _face_ —how could this happen to your baby, how could they do this—

As you come back to yourself, you hear one of the announcers say, “…two weeks before Vriska Serket’s euthanization.  Back to you, Angela.”

_“Thanks, Mike.  It hasn’t been long since then but it’s possible that the outcome of this trial will have a huge impact on the way we view trolls.”_

What was the name?  What was it, he just said it—it started with an F, you think.

When you google “Frisca Circuit”, it’s a testament to the little troll’s fame that Google knows you’re looking for Vriska Serket.  There are pictures everywhere, conflicting opinions, differing stories.  You don’t know what to believe except that she didn’t deserve to die.  You refuse to believe that, no matter how many articles remind their readers sternly that she was responsible for someone’s death.

_The look on his face…_

The young man’s name is John Egbert and he is older even than you had thought when adjusting your estimate.  It’s not your fault he’s a bit baby-faced.  Not so much anymore, though, you think, looking at the most recent picture of him.  He looks…aged.  Not distraught, but worn by distress.

You remember that look on your own face, but your face was never all over the internet.  And the little troll, Vriska, there are more than pictures of her.  There are videos.  Videos of her talking and laughing and there are thousands of views, thousands of people all talking about her.  You want to cry and you want to laugh and you want, like the grandmother you are at heart, to hug everyone involved.  It’s not all good, but _people are talking._  

And though you don’t know it, this is only the first sign of hope.

You find the second one on Facebook, one early morning in 2012.  You’re not quite sure about Facebook.  You don’t want to catch up with “old friends” and whenever you make a post about analyzing the text of a new favorite book, your old students leave comments like “LOL classic Mrs. Maryam!  Good one!”  You never have the heart to tell them you’re completely serious and this is just the only thing you can think to do with your Facebook account.

The other thing about Facebook that bothers you is the way it pretends to know what you like.  It must have told you that you would enjoy playing at least twenty games by now, and by now you’ve stopped looking into those assertions because all of the games are completely pointless.

There is, however, a little pop-up that won’t stop appearing in your sidebar under “We think you would like”, and its cut-off heading reads **SPCT: The Society for the Prevention of Crue…**

You’ve never thought much of it—there are so many groups for so many causes these days and you can hardly keep track of them—but one day you wonder, looking at it, what the T stands for.

 _Trolls_ , you think, and it takes you a full five seconds for you to realize exactly what it might mean if you’re right, and then you scroll furiously back up to click on the link.

And there it is: **Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Trolls**

The most recent post is a picture of a thin blond boy ( _man_ , you think furiously—you are such an old woman) holding the camera away from himself so that he can take a picture of himself with the little troll next to him. 

The troll is wearing a red-and-white hoodie that’s far too big for him (you suspect it belongs to the blond man) and there’s an enormous pair of headphones pulled over his ears.  They’re also over top of the hood, and you think his horns must not be very large or pointy because you can’t see them through the cloth.  Both the troll and the man are making exaggerated attempts at a “cool” pose.  It’s adorable.

Below that there’s a very short, unsteady home video, aimed at a piece of paper on which is written in large gray letters, I AM NOT COMEING OUT, BRING ME FOOD

 _“Uh, Karkat got mad at us today and decided not to leave his bedroom ever,”_ says a voice off-camera.  _“We’re tryin’ to treat it seriously but it’s hard when he won’t stop bein’ adorable.”_

And there’s more, so much more.  You scroll quickly past most of it—you’ll look later but a part of you desperately needs to know what the first couple of posts are, how this started, who these people are.

The very first post is another video, and you freeze before clicking the play button because the preview image for the video is the face of the young troll who was wearing the hoodie and headphones in the first photo.  Without the hood, you can see the small, round horns and the serious gray eyes and your breath is coming faster because the resemblance is just too strong.

_Filmed and composited by Dave and Dirk Strider.  If you want the music credits, maybe you should read the description instead of asking.  Special thanks to Dr. Equius Zahhak._

You stare.  You process the name, the title _Doctor_ , the associations.  Tentatively, you hit play.  Five minutes later—five minutes of plaintive piano music, heartstring-tugging vocals, incredibly adorable photos, and guilt-inducing narration in Equius Zahhak’s sonorous bass voice—you’re in tears.  It’s not because of the video itself.  It’s because people took time to make it.  Because people care now, because other people will see this and maybe start caring too.

You think, _We have miles to go._

This is not how it ends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel kind of bad about using other people's stories as a happy ending, but it seemed kind of...right, somehow.  
> Really though, in the end, there are plenty of things I regret about this story. As ever, I liked my work more before sharing it with the internet, since the act of sharing always leaves me slightly embarrassed and wondering vaguely why I did it--kind of like the feeling you get after eating too much at a buffet. I feel like I went about writing it in the wrong way, or tried too hard, or asked too much of people.  
> That said, people enjoyed it and worried over it and cried about it. And that makes it worth it, I think. Thank you for reading Before I Sleep and for leaving kind reviews and (hopefully) loving Silas and Rosa as much as I did.  
> Stupid sad ancestors.


End file.
